@Winterrose
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In 2014 I read a @paulg essay, centered on two words, that totally cracked my mind. It pulled me out of depression and gave me hope that one day I’d be one of those founders or investors at YC demo day.
It took a decade, and those two words on repeat, but last Wednesday I stood in a room at YC surrounded by the founders and investors I once dreamed of joining.
No longer "an imposter"
No longer "an outsider"
Just "Britton - big YC fan, former (non YC) founder, small check investor, and big tech champion for startups"
I felt peace for a moment, excitement for the future too.
Then another thought entered: How? How the hell did I manage to get here?
This isn’t a “here’s how I did it and you can do it to” kinda post though. You’re not me, our circumstances are not the same, but I'm still gonna click "Post".
So here’s my “too long to read” essay sharing how it started, what Paul wrote, and a bit of "So what?" for you to explore and maybe even inspire you to keep pushing.
———————
How F**ked was I?
I was really down, badly down.
I dropped out of college in 2013 to marry Elle, grow our Bitcoin, and “learn entrepreneurship” from the best mentor I had met at school (by working at his company).
I gave myself 3 years to start a company. I was convinced between the internet, bitcoin, and this job opportunity we’d succeed. The path looked hard but not impossible if we were willing to sacrifice.
Elle and I decided to go for it. We left Alaska, went to Utah, and lived in a room in my grandparents house to save money so I could become an entrepreneur.
8 months into that journey MtGox bitcoin trading exchange collapsed. I was devastated.
My credit was leveraged to the tits and my savings was wiped out completely. The BTC nest egg I had planned to turn into a future of abundance.... was snatched from me. The “low pay high experience” job felt like a prison with no offramp to my own path. In-job bureaucracy that felt impossible to conquer. I failed and no one I knew IRL even understood why...
I was crushed into catatonic haplessness and became depressed. Elle was a saint. Literally pulled me out of bed for a month. She woke up early, made breakfast, would bring me my meds, remind me to eat, put up with my disempowered video game binges, cut my hair, clipped my fingernails, drove me to work. And the hardest thing… she was patient. (I love you Elle.)
————————————
Paul’s Words:
A month went by and Elle and I got in an argument because I’d been spending too much time playing video games. I played because I was depressed and became more depressed because I played.
After the fight I was scrolling twitter. Mad. Mad at life. Mad at the universe. Mad at Mark Karpeles, and somewhere in the tech adjacent bowels of early Bitcoin twitter I came across an essay by Paul Graham. “RELENTLESSLY RESOURCEFUL”
Those were the words. I read them and decided “Yep. That’s me. Or it’s gonna be me.”
So I started being more relentless and more resourceful. And tried to get better at doing more of both frequently.
Deciding to be relentlessly resourceful was a one time choice.
Becoming consistent was the battle. But it was the future I wanted, and I needed to become consistently relentlessly resourceful. So I started working on it.
It hurt. It was hard, it was scary, it took way longer than I wanted and I’m really fucking happy I did it.
I’m not gonna bore you with my entire life story, but I will bore you with this list for me to revisit in the future and maybe you can grab something off it and use it to make yourself more relentlessly resourceful:
(or not if you're hapless)
- I went to every event I could and talked to every person. I was the first one to arrive and the last one to leave.
- People thought I was useless or annoying. So I learned to make friends and be formidably skilled.
- I asked people to be friends, I helped others, and I worked and cared hard.
- I learned to feel out those who were relentlessly resourceful like me vs those who weren’t.
- I launched and failed a startup… a few times (after so many false starts) and learned it’s really hard to predict who’s actually RR vs those who talk like they are.
- Got rejected by YC.
- Disappointed my cofounders by giving up.
- Started a family, bought a house, with Elle after reproductive “launch and failures”.
- I fixed skill & personality issues, with hard work.
- I learned to ask for help, to ask for money, to ask for advice.
- I learned to program, believed in AI, learned to cold email, and abandoned zero sum thinking.
- I worked my ass off, felt like an imposter, hung in there.
YOU CAN TOO. Pick 2 things that sound stupid from the list and try them.
————————————
So What? What now?
I can't tell you what will work for you. But if you feel discouraged or blocked Paul's essay is a good place to start.
This post is to share what made me, Me.
Go figure out what will make you, you.
But I will tell you my biggest learning, my real secret sauce: I’ve learned to compound relentless resourcefulness. I’ve obsessively sought out and helped the relentlessly resourceful people I meet along the way, surrounded myself with the most relentlessly resourceful customers, colleagues, and friends and got the reps in necessary to hone my ability to attract, identify, inspire, teach and empower more relentlessly successful people while developing two attributes many of them don’t possess: long term patience and an appetite for sharing the glory.
Paul says in the essay “Being relentlessly resourceful is definitely not the recipe for success in big companies... I don't even want to think what the recipe is in big companies, but it is certainly longer and messier, involving some combination of resourcefulness, obedience, and building alliances.”
I've been "cooking" this "big company recipe" with my secret sauce for 4 years now. I haven’t figured all of it out yet. But there’s increasing appetite for the relentlessly resourceful in big tech companies if you find the right leaders to align with (cough *satya*), can outlast the bureaucracy, tactfully use disobedience, can see the right outcome and above all else, find the right customers & timing to deliver results with clarity and energy.
————————————
Damn. You read this rambling? Thank you.
Maybe all of this is just a long way of explaining why I'm a YC fan. Maybe it's just longwinded way of saying Thank you @paulg publicly. Maybe I'm trying to convince founders to find a real incredible kick ass ride-or-die spouse like Elle and prioritize having kids. Let me know if you figure it out.
I think it's mostly a bat signal that if you're relentlessly resourceful, we should maybe be friends. Because I'm not stopping. :)
paulgraham.com/relres.html
a f*cking Q clearance level background check would have caught this stuff @OpenAI
hire some damn pinkertons and figure it out.
don't sandbag us into another manhattan project
"yeah kids, i'm old enough to remember when ai couldn't even make will smith eat spaghetti. but look at us now"
please god dont fire me for this but
ya’ll
asha is that OG
Today we're standing up XBOX LABS (labs.xbox.com). Here is the note that I sent to the team:
Team,
The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we've helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together.
In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another.
These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models.
To explore these possibilities, I’ve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.
I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We've spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have.
Our priorities aren't changing. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to our hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology that is game design led without abandoning the work already underway.
Asha
Arthur is right
bitch move
sovereign cucked
> be saudi spy
> get job at OpenAI
> vibecode spyware onto a recording device
> ...using *your own wife's* chatgpt account
> literally include the exact device specs in the prompt
> sneak into a conference room
> get photographed
> also forget your bag
> security finds your bag
> with more devices
> ...
> straight to jail
"intelligence" service is a bit generous here
britton is afk retweeted
Are you kidding me?
The official Xbox response to mega-viral game remixing is "This is good for players. It challenges our business model, so what. We'll start a lab."
Asha should run MS. Never seen anyone this tapped in
Today we're standing up XBOX LABS (labs.xbox.com). Here is the note that I sent to the team:
Team,
The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we've helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together.
In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another.
These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models.
To explore these possibilities, I’ve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.
I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We've spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have.
Our priorities aren't changing. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to our hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology that is game design led without abandoning the work already underway.
Asha
A LEGEND
the wartime Xbox CEO we needed.
the speed of adaptation to the players…
the ability to listen,
bring vision,
and most importantly
drive rapid action.
big companies need fast moving teams now more than ever
Today we're standing up XBOX LABS (labs.xbox.com). Here is the note that I sent to the team:
Team,
The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we've helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together.
In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another.
These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models.
To explore these possibilities, I’ve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.
I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We've spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have.
Our priorities aren't changing. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to our hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology that is game design led without abandoning the work already underway.
Asha
yo @alexandr_wang - i'll trade my kids' game data for
3 Muse Code Maximum Usage accounts to use for life
trading data for a ticket out of the generational underclass sounds fair.
flying into sf
12:15 pm: leave house
12:27 pm: arrive at PSC
12:35 pm: through airport security
12:40 pm: board
12:43 pm: seated
12:57 pm: deplane for SFO traffic delay
1:47 pm: reboard and fly
at first I thought he was joking. he'd say he wanted his own cloud, file system, OS, chat app, harness...
i've always knew that @theo is "that motherf*cka".
then add ai...
now i see he wont stop till he's rebuilt every piece of software that annoys him or he dislikes (but uses)
