March 2007(This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.)We've now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some dataabout success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, hadeight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at leastfour succeeded. Three have been acquired: Reddit was a merger oftwo, Reddit and Infogami, and a third was acquired that we can'ttalk about yet. Another from that batch was Loopt, which is doingso well they could probably be acquired in about ten minutes ifthey wanted to.So about half the founders from that first summer, less than twoyears ago, are now rich, at least by their standards. (One thingyou learn when you get rich is that there are many degrees of it.)I'm not ready to predict our success rate will stay as high as 50%.That first batch could have been an anomaly. But we should be ableto do better than the oft-quoted (and probably madeup) standard figure of 10%. I'd feel safe aiming at 25%.Even the founders who fail don't seem to have such a bad time. Ofthose first eight startups, three are now probably dead. In twocases the founders just went on to do other things at the end ofthe summer. I don't think they were traumatized by the experience.The closest to a traumatic failure was Kiko, whose founders keptworking on their startup for a whole year before being squashed byGoogle Calendar. But they ended up happy. They sold their softwareon eBay for a quarter of a million dollars. After they paid backtheir angel investors, they had about a year's salary each. [1]Then they immediately went on to start a new and much more excitingstartup, Justin.TV.So here is an even more striking statistic: 0% of that first batchhad a terrible experience. They had ups and downs, like everystartup, but I don't think any would have traded it for a job in acubicle. And that statistic is probably not an anomaly. Whateverour long-term success rate ends up being, I think the rate of peoplewho wish they'd gotten a regular job will stay close to 0%.The big mystery to me is: why don't more people start startups? Ifnearly everyone who does it prefers it to a regular job, and asignificant percentage get rich, why doesn't everyone want to dothis? A lot of people think we get thousands of applications foreach funding cycle. In fact we usually only get several hundred.Why don't more people apply? And while it must seem to anyonewatching this world that startups are popping up like crazy, thenumber is small compared to the number of people with the necessaryskills. The great majority of programmers still go straight fromcollege to cubicle, and stay there.It seems like people are not acting in their own interest. What'sgoing on? Well, I can answer that. Because of Y Combinator'sposition at the very start of the venture funding process, we'reprobably the world's leading experts on the psychology of peoplewho aren't sure if they want to start a company.There's nothing wrong with being unsure. If you're a hacker thinkingabout starting a startup and hesitating before taking the leap,you're part of a grand tradition. Larry and Sergey seem to havefelt the same before they started Google, and so did Jerry and Filobefore they started Yahoo. In fact, I'd guess the most successfulstartups are the ones started by uncertain hackers rather thangung-ho business guys.We have some evidence to support this. Several of the most successfulstartups we've funded told us later that they only decided to applyat the last moment. Some decided only hours before the deadline.The way to deal with uncertainty is to analyze it into components.Most people who are reluctant to do something have about eightdifferent reasons mixed together in their heads, and don't knowthemselves which are biggest. Some will be justified and somebogus, but unless you know the relative proportion of each, youdon't know whether your overall uncertainty is mostly justified ormostly bogus.So I'm going to list all the components of people's reluctance tostart startups, and explain which are real. Then would-be founderscan use this as a checklist to examine their own feelings.I admit my goal is to increase your self-confidence. But there aretwo things different here from the usual confidence-building exercise.One is that I'm motivated to be honest. Most people in theconfidence-building business have already achieved their goal whenyou buy the book or pay to attend the seminar where they tell youhow great you are. Whereas if I encourage people to start startupswho shouldn't, I make my own life worse. If I encourage too manypeople to apply to Y Combinator, it just means more work for me,because I have to read all the applications.The other thing that's going to be different is my approach. Insteadof being positive, I'm going to be negative. Instead of tellingyou "come on, you can do it" I'm going to consider all the reasonsyou aren't doing it, and show why most (but not all) should beignored. We'll start with the one everyone's born with.1. Too youngA lot of people think they're too young to start a startup. Manyare right. The median age worldwide is about 27, so probably athird of the population can truthfully say they're too young.What's too young? One of our goals with Y Combinator was to discoverthe lower bound on the age of startup founders. It always seemedto us that investors were too conservative here—that they wantedto fund professors, when really they should be funding grad studentsor even undergrads.The main thing we've discovered from pushing the edge of thisenvelope is not where the edge is, but how fuzzy it is. The outerlimit may be as low as 16. We don't look beyond 18 because peopleyounger than that can't legally enter into contracts. But the mostsuccessful founder we've funded so far, Sam Altman, was 19 at thetime.Sam Altman, however, is an outlying data point. When he was 19,he seemed like he had a 40 year old inside him. There are other19 year olds who are 12 inside.There's a reason we have a distinct word "adult" for people over acertain age. There is a threshold you cross. It's conventionallyfixed at 21, but different people cross it at greatly varying ages.You're old enough to start a startup if you've crossed this threshold,whatever your age.How do you tell? There are a couple tests adults use. I realizedthese tests existed after meeting Sam Altman, actually. I noticedthat I felt like I was talking to someone much older. Afterward Iwondered, what am I even measuring? What made him seem older?One test adults use is whether you still have the kid flake reflex.When you're a little kid and you're asked to do something hard, youcan cry and say "I can't do it" and the adults will probably letyou off. As a kid there's a magic button you can press by saying"I'm just a kid" that will get you out of most difficult situations.Whereas adults, by definition, are not allowed to flake. They stilldo, of course, but when they do they're ruthlessly pruned.The other way to tell an adult is by how they react to a challenge.Someone who's not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challengefrom an adult in a way that acknowledges their dominance. If anadult says "that's a stupid idea," a kid will either crawl awaywith his tail between his legs, or rebel. But rebelling presumesinferiority as much as submission. The adult response to"that's a stupid idea," is simply to look the other person in theeye and say "Really? Why do you think so?"There are a lot of adults who still react childishly to challenges,of course. What you don't often find are kids who react to challengeslike adults. When you do, you've found an adult, whatever theirage.2. Too inexperiencedI once wrote that startup founders should be at least 23, and thatpeople should work for another company for a few years beforestarting their own. I no longer believe that, and what changed mymind is the example of the startups we've funded.I still think 23 is a better age than 21. But the best way to getexperience if you're 21 is to start a startup. So, paradoxically,if you're too inexperienced to start a startup, what you should dois start one. That's a way more efficient cure for inexperiencethan a normal job. In fact, getting a normal job may actually makeyou less able to start a startup, by turning you into a tame animalwho thinks he needs an office to work in and a product manager totell him what software to write.What really convinced me of this was the Kikos. They started astartup right out of college. Their inexperience caused them tomake a lot of mistakes. But by the time we funded their secondstartup, a year later, they had become extremely formidable. Theywere certainly not tame animals. And there is no way they'd havegrown so much if they'd spent that year working at Microsoft, oreven Google. They'd still have been diffident junior programmers.So now I'd advise people to go ahead and start startups right outof college. There's no better time to take risks than when you'reyoung. Sure, you'll probably fail. But even failure will get youto the ultimate goal faster than getting a job.It worries me a bit to be saying this, because in effect we'readvising people to educate themselves by failing at our expense,but it's the truth.3. Not determined enoughYou need a lot of determination to succeed as a startup founder.It's probably the single best predictor of success.Some people may not be determined enough to make it. It'shard for me to say for sure, because I'm so determined that I can'timagine what's going on in the heads of people who aren't. But Iknow they exist.Most hackers probably underestimate their determination. I've seena lot become visibly more determined as they get used to running a startup. I can think ofseveral we've funded who would have been delighted at first to bebought for $2 million, but are now set on world domination.How can you tell if you're determined enough, when Larry and Sergeythemselves were unsure at first about starting a company? I'mguessing here, but I'd say the test is whether you're sufficientlydriven to work on your own projects. Though they may have beenunsure whether they wanted to start a company, it doesn't seem asif Larry and Sergey were meek little research assistants, obedientlydoing their advisors' bidding. They started projects of their own.4. Not smart enoughYou may need to be moderately smart to succeed as a startup founder.But if you're worried about this, you're probably mistaken. Ifyou're smart enough to worry that you might not be smart enough tostart a startup, you probably are.And in any case, starting a startup just doesn't require that muchintelligence. Some startups do. You have to be good at math towrite Mathematica. But most companies do more mundane stuff wherethe decisive factor is effort, not brains. Silicon Valley can warpyour perspective on this, because there's a cult of smartness here.People who aren't smart at least try to act that way. But if youthink it takes a lot of intelligence to get rich, try spending acouple days in some of the fancier bits of New York or LA.If you don't think you're smart enough to start a startup doingsomething technically difficult, just write enterprise software.Enterprise software companies aren't technology companies, they'resales companies, and sales depends mostly on effort.5. Know nothing about businessThis is another variable whose coefficient should be zero. Youdon't need to know anything about business to start a startup. Theinitial focus should be the product. All you need to know in thisphase is how to build things people want. If you succeed, you'llhave to think about how to make money from it. But this is so easyyou can pick it up on the fly.I get a fair amount of flak for telling founders just to makesomething great and not worry too much about making money. And yetall the empirical evidence points that way: pretty much 100% ofstartups that make something popular manage to make money from it.And acquirers tell me privately that revenue is not what they buystartups for, but their strategic value. Which means, because theymade something people want. Acquirers know the rule holds for themtoo: if users love you, you can always make money from that somehow,and if they don't, the cleverest business model in the world won'tsave you.So why do so many people argue with me? I think one reason is thatthey hate the idea that a bunch of twenty year olds could get richfrom building something cool that doesn't make any money. Theyjust don't want that to be possible. But how possible it is doesn'tdepend on how much they want it to be.For a while it annoyed me to hear myself described as some kind ofirresponsible pied piper, leading impressionable young hackers downthe road to ruin. But now I realize this kind of controversy is asign of a good idea.The most valuable truths are the ones most people don't believe.They're like undervalued stocks. If you start with them, you'llhave the whole field to yourself. So when you find an idea youknow is good but most people disagree with, you should notmerely ignore their objections, but push aggressively in thatdirection. In this case, that means you should seek out ideas thatwould be popular but seem hard to make money from.We'll bet a seed round you can't make something popular that wecan't figure out how to make money from.6. No cofounderNot having a cofounder is a real problem. A startup is too muchfor one person to bear. And though we differ from other investorson a lot of questions, we all agree on this. All investors, withoutexception, are more likely to fund you with a cofounder than without.We've funded two single founders, but in both cases we suggestedtheir first priority should be to find a cofounder. Both did. Butwe'd have preferred them to have cofounders before they applied.It's not super hard to get a cofounder for a project that's justbeen funded, and we'd rather have cofounders committed enough tosign up for something super hard.If you don't have a cofounder, what should you do? Get one. It'smore important than anything else. If there's no one where youlive who wants to start a startup with you, move where there arepeople who do. If no one wants to work with you on your currentidea, switch to an idea people want to work on.If you're still in school, you're surrounded by potential cofounders.A few years out it gets harder to find them. Not only do you havea smaller pool to draw from, but most already have jobs, and perhapseven families to support. So if you had friends in college youused to scheme about startups with, stay in touch with them as wellas you can. That may help keep the dream alive.It's possible you could meet a cofounder through something like auser's group or a conference. But I wouldn't be too optimistic.You need to work with someone to know whether you want them as acofounder. [2]The real lesson to draw from this is not how to find a cofounder,but that you should start startups when you're young and there arelots of them around.7. No ideaIn a sense, it's not a problem if you don't have a good idea, becausemost startups change their idea anyway. In the average Y Combinatorstartup, I'd guess 70% of the idea is new at the end of thefirst three months. Sometimes it's 100%.In fact, we're so sure the founders are more important than theinitial idea that we're going to try something new this fundingcycle. We're going to let people apply with no idea at all. If youwant, you can answer the question on the application form that askswhat you're going to do with "We have no idea." If you seem reallygood we'll accept you anyway. We're confident we can sit down withyou and cook up some promising project.Really this just codifies what we do already. We put little weighton the idea. We ask mainly out of politeness. The kind of questionon the application form that we really care about is the one wherewe ask what cool things you've made. If what you've made is versionone of a promising startup, so much the better, but the main thingwe care about is whether you're good at making things. Being leaddeveloper of a popular open source project counts almost as much.That solves the problem if you get funded by Y Combinator. Whatabout in the general case? Because in another sense, it is a problemif you don't have an idea. If you start a startup with no idea,what do you do next?So here's the brief recipe for getting startup ideas. Find somethingthat's missing in your own life, and supply that need—no matterhow specific to you it seems. Steve Wozniak built himself a computer;who knew so many other people would want them? A need that's narrowbut genuine is a better starting point than one that's broad buthypothetical. So even if the problem is simply that you don't havea date on Saturday night, if you can think of a way to fix that bywriting software, you're onto something, because a lot of otherpeople have the same problem.8. No room for more startupsA lot of people look at the ever-increasing number of startups andthink "this can't continue." Implicit in their thinking is afallacy: that there is some limit on the number of startups therecould be. But this is false. No one claims there's any limit onthe number of people who can work for salary at 1000-person companies.Why should there be any limit on the number who can work for equityat 5-person companies? [3]Nearly everyone who works is satisfying some kind of need. Breakingup companies into smaller units doesn't make those needs go away.Existing needs would probably get satisfied more efficiently by anetwork of startups than by a few giant, hierarchical organizations,but I don't think that would mean less opportunity, because satisfyingcurrent needs would lead to more. Certainly this tends to be thecase in individuals. Nor is there anything wrong with that. Wetake for granted things that medieval kings would have consideredeffeminate luxuries, like whole buildings heated to spring temperaturesyear round. And if things go well, our descendants will take forgranted things we would consider shockingly luxurious. There isno absolute standard for material wealth. Health care is a componentof it, and that alone is a black hole. For the foreseeable future,people will want ever more material wealth, so there is no limitto the amount of work available for companies, and for startups inparticular.Usually the limited-room fallacy is not expressed directly. Usuallyit's implicit in statements like "there are only so many startupsGoogle, Microsoft, and Yahoo can buy." Maybe, though the list ofacquirers is a lot longer than that. And whatever you think ofother acquirers, Google is not stupid. The reason big companiesbuy startups is that they've created something valuable. And whyshould there be any limit to the number of valuable startups companiescan acquire, any more than there is a limit to the amount of wealthindividual people want? Maybe there would be practical limits onthe number of startups any one acquirer could assimilate, but ifthere is value to be had, in the form of upside that founders arewilling to forgo in return for an immediate payment, acquirers willevolve to consume it. Markets are pretty smart that way.9. Family to supportThis one is real. I wouldn't advise anyone with a family to starta startup. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that I don't wantto take responsibility for advising it. I'm willing to takeresponsibility for telling 22 year olds to start startups. So whatif they fail? They'll learn a lot, and that job at Microsoft willstill be waiting for them if they need it. But I'm not preparedto cross moms.What you can do, if you have a family and want to start a startup,is start a consulting business you can then gradually turn into aproduct business. Empirically the chances of pulling that off seemvery small. You're never going to produce Google this way. But atleast you'll never be without an income.Another way to decrease the risk is to join an existing startupinstead of starting your own. Being one of the first employees ofa startup is a lot like being a founder, in both the good ways andthe bad. You'll be roughly 1/n^2 founder, where n is your employeenumber.As with the question of cofounders, the real lesson here is to startstartups when you're young.10. Independently wealthyThis is my excuse for not starting a startup. Startups are stressful.Why do it if you don't need the money? For every "serial entrepreneur,"there are probably twenty sane ones who think "Start anothercompany? Are you crazy?"I've come close to starting new startups a couple times, but Ialways pull back because I don't want four years of my life to beconsumed by random schleps. I know this business well enough toknow you can't do it half-heartedly. What makes a good startupfounder so dangerous is his willingness to endure infinite schleps.There is a bit of a problem with retirement, though. Like a lotof people, I like to work. And one of the many weird little problemsyou discover when you get rich is that a lot of the interestingpeople you'd like to work with are not rich. They need to work atsomething that pays the bills. Which means if you want to havethem as colleagues, you have to work at something that pays thebills too, even though you don't need to. I think this is whatdrives a lot of serial entrepreneurs, actually.That's why I love working on Y Combinator so much. It's an excuseto work on something interesting with people I like.11. Not ready for commitmentThis was my reason for not starting a startup for most of my twenties.Like a lot of people that age, I valued freedom most of all. I wasreluctant to do anything that required a commitment of more than afew months. Nor would I have wanted to do anything that completelytook over my life the way a startup does. And that's fine. If youwant to spend your time travelling around, or playing in a band,or whatever, that's a perfectly legitimate reason not to start acompany.If you start a startup that succeeds, it's going to consume at leastthree or four years. (If it fails, you'll be done a lot quicker.)So you shouldn't do it if you're not ready for commitments on thatscale. Be aware, though, that if you get a regular job, you'llprobably end up working there for as long as a startup would take,and you'll find you have much less spare time than you might expect.So if you're ready to clip on that ID badge and go to that orientationsession, you may also be ready to start that startup.12. Need for structureI'm told there are people who need structure in their lives. Thisseems to be a nice way of saying they need someone to tell themwhat to do. I believe such people exist. There's plenty of empiricalevidence: armies, religious cults, and so on. They may even be themajority.If you're one of these people, you probably shouldn't start astartup. In fact, you probably shouldn't even go to work for one.In a good startup, you don't get told what to do very much. Theremay be one person whose job title is CEO, but till the company hasabout twelve people no one should be telling anyone what to do.That's too inefficient. Each person should just do what they needto without anyone telling them.If that sounds like a recipe for chaos, think about a soccer team.Eleven people manage to work together in quite complicated ways,and yet only in occasional emergencies does anyone tell anyone elsewhat to do. A reporter once asked David Beckham if there were anylanguage problems at Real Madrid, since the players were from abouteight different countries. He said it was never an issue, becauseeveryone was so good they never had to talk. They all just did theright thing.How do you tell if you're independent-minded enough to start astartup? If you'd bristle at the suggestion that you aren't, thenyou probably are.13. Fear of uncertaintyPerhaps some people are deterred from starting startups becausethey don't like the uncertainty. If you go to work for Microsoft,you can predict fairly accurately what the next few years will belike—all too accurately, in fact. If you start a startup, anythingmight happen.Well, if you're troubled by uncertainty, I can solve that problemfor you: if you start a startup, it will probably fail. Seriously, though, this is not a bad way to thinkabout the whole experience. Hope for the best, but expect theworst. In the worst case, it will at least be interesting. In thebest case you might get rich.No one will blame you if the startup tanks, so long as you made aserious effort. There may once have been a time when employerswould regard that as a mark against you, but they wouldn't now. Iasked managers at big companies, and they all said they'd preferto hire someone who'd tried to start a startup and failed oversomeone who'd spent the same time working at a big company.Nor will investors hold it against you, as long as you didn't failout of laziness or incurable stupidity. I'm told there's a lotof stigma attached to failing in other places—in Europe, forexample. Not here. In America, companies, like practicallyeverything else, are disposable.14. Don't realize what you're avoidingOne reason people who've been out in the world for a year or twomake better founders than people straight from college is that theyknow what they're avoiding. If their startup fails, they'll haveto get a job, and they know how much jobs suck.If you've had summer jobs in college, you may think you know whatjobs are like, but you probably don't. Summer jobs at technologycompanies are not real jobs. If you get a summer job as a waiter,that's a real job. Then you have to carry your weight. But softwarecompanies don't hire students for the summer as a source of cheaplabor. They do it in the hope of recruiting them when they graduate.So while they're happy if you produce, they don't expect you to.That will change if you get a real job after you graduate. Thenyou'll have to earn your keep. And since most of what big companiesdo is boring, you're going to have to work on boring stuff. Easy,compared to college, but boring. At first it may seem cool to getpaid for doing easy stuff, after paying to do hard stuff in college.But that wears off after a few months. Eventually it gets demoralizingto work on dumb stuff, even if it's easy and you get paid a lot.And that's not the worst of it. The thing that really sucks abouthaving a regular job is the expectation that you're supposed to bethere at certain times. Even Google is afflicted with this,apparently. And what this means, as everyone who's had a regularjob can tell you, is that there are going to be times when you haveabsolutely no desire to work on anything, and you're going to haveto go to work anyway and sit in front of your screen and pretendto. To someone who likes work, as most good hackers do, this istorture.In a startup, you skip all that. There's no concept of office hoursin most startups. Work and life just get mixed together. But thegood thing about that is that no one minds if you have a life atwork. In a startup you can do whatever you want most of the time.If you're a founder, what you want to do most of the time is work.But you never have to pretend to.If you took a nap in your office in a big company, it would seemunprofessional. But if you're starting a startup and you fallasleep in the middle of the day, your cofounders will just assumeyou were tired.15. Parents want you to be a doctorA significant number of would-be startup founders are probablydissuaded from doing it by their parents. I'm not going to say youshouldn't listen to them. Families are entitled to their owntraditions, and who am I to argue with them? But I will give youa couple reasons why a safe career might not be what your parentsreally want for you.One is that parents tend to be more conservative for their kidsthan they would be for themselves. This is actually a rationalresponse to their situation. Parents end up sharing more of theirkids' ill fortune than good fortune. Most parents don't mind this;it's part of the job; but it does tend to make them excessivelyconservative. And erring on the side of conservatism is stillerring. In almost everything, reward is proportionate to risk. Soby protecting their kids from risk, parents are, without realizingit, also protecting them from rewards. If they saw that, they'dwant you to take more risks.The other reason parents may be mistaken is that, like generals,they're always fighting the last war. If they want you to be adoctor, odds are it's not just because they want you to help thesick, but also because it's a prestigious and lucrative career.[4]But not so lucrative or prestigious as it was when theiropinions were formed. When I was a kid in the seventies, a doctorwas the thing to be. There was a sort of golden triangle involvingdoctors, Mercedes 450SLs, and tennis. All three vertices now seempretty dated.The parents who want you to be a doctor may simply not realize howmuch things have changed. Would they be that unhappy if you wereSteve Jobs instead? So I think the way to deal with your parents'opinions about what you should do is to treat them like featurerequests. Even if your only goal is to please them, the way to dothat is not simply to give them what they ask for. Instead thinkabout why they're asking for something, and see if there's a betterway to give them what they need.16. A job is the defaultThis leads us to the last and probably most powerful reason peopleget regular jobs: it's the default thing to do. Defaults areenormously powerful, precisely because they operate without anyconscious choice.To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if youneed money, you should get a job. Actually this tradition is notmuch more than a hundred years old. Before that, the default wayto make a living was by farming. It's a bad plan to treat somethingonly a hundred years old as an axiom. By historical standards,that's something that's changing pretty rapidly.We may be seeing another such change right now. I've read a lotof economic history, and I understand the startup world pretty well,and it now seems to me fairly likely that we're seeing the beginningof a change like the one from farming to manufacturing.And you know what? If you'd been around when that change began(around 1000 in Europe) it would have seemed to nearly everyonethat running off to the city to make your fortune was a crazy thingto do. Though serfs were in principle forbidden to leave theirmanors, it can't have been that hard to run away to a city. Therewere no guards patrolling the perimeter of the village. Whatprevented most serfs from leaving was that it seemed insanely risky.Leave one's plot of land? Leave the people you'd spent your wholelife with, to live in a giant city of three or four thousand completestrangers? How would you live? How would you get food, if youdidn't grow it?Frightening as it seemed to them, it's now the default with us tolive by our wits. So if it seems risky to you to start a startup,think how risky it once seemed to your ancestors to live as we donow. Oddly enough, the people who know this best are the very onestrying to get you to stick to the old model. How can Larry andSergey say you should come work as their employee, when they didn'tget jobs themselves?Now we look back on medieval peasants and wonder how they stood it.How grim it must have been to till the same fields your whole lifewith no hope of anything better, under the thumb of lords and priestsyou had to give all your surplus to and acknowledge as your masters.I wouldn't be surprised if one day people look back on what weconsider a normal job in the same way. How grim it would be tocommute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office complex, andbe told what to do by someone you had to acknowledge as a boss—someone who could call you into their office and say "take a seat,"and you'd sit! Imagine having to ask permission to releasesoftware to users. Imagine being sad on Sunday afternoons becausethe weekend was almost over, and tomorrow you'd have to get up andgo to work. How did they stand it?It's exciting to think we may be on the cusp of another shift likethe one from farming to manufacturing. That's why I care aboutstartups. Startups aren't interesting just because they're a wayto make a lot of money. I couldn't care less about other ways todo that, like speculating in securities. At most those are interestingthe way puzzles are. There's more going on with startups. Theymay represent one of those rare, historic shifts in the way wealth is created.That's ultimately what drives us to work on Y Combinator. We wantto make money, if only so we don't have to stop doing it, but that'snot the main goal. There have only been a handful of these greateconomic shifts in human history. It would be an amazing hack tomake one happen faster.Notes[1]The only people who lost were us. The angels had convertibledebt, so they had first claim on the proceeds of the auction. YCombinator only got 38 cents on the dollar.[2]The best kind of organization for that might be an open sourceproject, but those don't involve a lot of face to face meetings.Maybe it would be worth starting one that did.[3]There need to be some number of big companies to acquire thestartups, so the number of big companies couldn't decrease to zero.[4]Thought experiment: If doctors did the same work, but asimpoverished outcasts, which parents would still want their kidsto be doctors?Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and RobertMorris for reading drafts of this, to the founders of Zenterfor letting me use their web-based PowerPoint killer even though it isn't launched yet, and to Ming-Hay Lukof the Berkeley CSUA for inviting me to speak.Comment on this essay.
