dataisfun's comments

Umm…ketamine IV at these doses is most certainly a unique and insane experience, speaking as someone who’s done it about a dozen times for anxiety.

I find it hard to read anything by Paul Graham these days without an allergic reaction to its hubris.

Couldn’t this be simplified to 3-4 sentences? Why so much ink spilled?

I can speak from direct experience that a lot of highly successful people in tech are miserable. This is not a path to try and copy.

I love how Wells Fargo, which was nabbed for a massive wide ranging scam / fraud, gets to be all sanctimonious about ethics or standards.

The categorization is interesting albeit deeply ungrounded in any real rigor and seems of a piece with one of his other recent essays, in which he developed a psychoanalytic theory of the various kinds of "haters" and "losers."

Further, I wish Paul Graham would try to convey his ideas with less condescension and smugness. There's a sense in which he maligns large swaths of humanity as somehow defective or worthy of shame. Certainly the term "idiots" doesn't help.

Further there's an essentialism and determinism that's sort of disturbing (labeling preschoolers as sheep is kind of messed up) and lacking in empathy.

Finally I suppose this is obvious, but I'm guessing Graham situates himself as a paragon of fierce independent-minded thinking and courage. It's rather easier to do that when you're absurdly independently wealthy. Thinking through the courageous stand countless people are taking even right now around the world, risking life and limb, just makes this feel a bit like a grievance-laden tempest in a teapot.

Yikes. You make some pretty strong claims that are not credible on their face.

1. "Not adaptive in any situation..."

Putting aside the many problems with evolutionary psychological explanations (just-so theory, underdetermination, so-called disjunction and grain problems), there's actually an very strong argument to OCD's adaptive role, both at the individual (threat response) and group. I think the group argument is most compelling, as various degrees of neuroticism have very high upside for risk management over time.

Or take depression for example. It can serve, theoretically, to reduce risk of conflict and death when social hierarchies might be in flux, it's a way to honestly signal a problem to ones group, it could be a mechanism to accurately try and signal a problem to oneself like physical pain does, its been theorized to potentially reduce risk of infection, etc.

2. These genes very clearly do not weed themselves out of the gene pool. In fact, mental illness has been on the rise, probably mostly because neurodiversity has been increasingly pathologized. The social construct in which these are considered disordered is hugely important.

3. Your comment about that empathy snp is extreme genetic essentialsm and determinism. Moreover, it's a single snp. I don't know of a single researcher who'd claim that something as complicated as empathy is either toast or not toast from a single snp.

They do in theory but there are countless excel spreadsheets in circulation with a full list of companies way in advance of demo day. If you're not plugged in and arrive at demo day, many VCs have reached out to companies way before you see them present.

I suppose I'm a combination of relieved, offended and proud to not be on the list.

The notion of control over one's life is elusive. Our futures can be wrought by trauma, poverty and the lottery that is our DNA, and by extension, our brain. Given the randomness/contingency Graham acknowledges explains his and others' success, and by implication the various dependencies en route to that success, I'd just ask for a bit more compassion for those, whether through birth or circumstance, find themselves constitutionally unable to make the most of their lives in the sense you probably mean. Something as simple as a deficit in executive function can wreak havoc on one's ability to self-motivate, just as an example.

I think there's a bit of cruelty in so casually reducing people to "losers." Taking what must be a complex set of personal histories and circumstances that lead people to that behavior and framing it as a matter of winner vs loser seems to border on smug, especially when the writer is clearly the former.

Yes, I know. But if you want to tell YC they don't get their pro rata (or practically speaking, convince the founder to tussle with them over that), have fun. I've seen them not budge even when it makes the founder's life much harder as they struggle to balance the pretty typical ownership requirements of new money.

Well, I think YC is pretty clear about the sorts of companies they aspire to invest in, e.g., Dropbox, AirBnB, etc. I also imagine quite a lot of the founders who apply to YC aren't aiming for "lifestyle" businesses, in particular since there are cheaper ways, from a dilution point of view, to raise the equivalent amount of capital (or alternatively, to bootstrap to early revenue and find alternative means to finance the business).

YC does indeed optimize for power law outcomes, but then again so does every venture investor (or at least, so should every venture investor).

Well, mea culpa. The piece does address the issue of bad investors. My main beef is with the line, "in the end, while some investors are better than others, none of them translate directly to success," which I don't think is a credible claim, or at least warrants more evidence.

Point #2 is so patently absurd its hard to take seriously. One, YC are themselves investors, and as far as I know they don't position themselves as causally inert in relation to a company's success / one of many indistinguishable and arbitrary alternatives.

Two, I don't think you will find many entrepreneurs who'd claim indifference around their investor choice. At the very least, this claim asks us to believe there aren't terrible investors who cause damage, which runs contrary to both common sense and history.

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This might work to maximize price but it won't necessarily land you with the best partners. The smartest, best money knows it and they make you pay for their investment. Moreover, approaching fundraising as a transactional auction in a quick sprint carries with it a bunch of "relationship debt." You're signing on to someone (your investor) you can't fire for the duration of your company's existence. Rushing into that might end up costing your company far more than the marginal gain from a bidding war. Just my two cents.

If I'm not mistaken, YC gets pro-rata as preferred shareholders, so their dilution is not any different from everyone else in that class.

This article seems to be in some conflict to how YC operates, which is designed around the demo day auction frenzy, where you might see valuation caps rise overnight on a rolling basis (I've seen some almost comical leaps in valuation in this regard), not to mention starting at prices in the $10-15M range. The ones that clear at those prices, on average, don't have the traction to justify it, which means the capital they get is often either second tier or first-tier call options. The net result is the best companies in the batch do just fine and because their prices, on average, were higher, YC and the company benefit from reduced dilution. The rest of the batch is then left with an inflated effective post-money that makes it harder for new capital to finance, especially if it follows an average growth curve.

New money doesn't particularly care you raised post demo-day at $15M if they think you're worth for example, at best, $12M now. It's a difficult conversation to have with founders and it can result in completely unnecessary pain around morale and optics. The worst loss is perversely invisible, as smart money might de-prioritize pursuing these companies knowing they have to work around the earlier mis-price. This is an opportunity cost that might not be apparent to most.

This is all complicated by the fact that demo day is in fact, not the first shot investors get at the companies in a batch. You might find that some of the most exciting companies in a given batch have been almost fully subscribed by the time demo day rolls around, as top tier firms don't wait till the actual demo day. Obviously, YC can't nor should they proscribe meeting with investors ahead of demo day, but this simply means access isn't as equally distributed as the notion of demo day might suggest. It looks to some degree like a second pass for folks without the network or access of a top-tier firm.

All this works great for YC, which, like every other fund in this world, makes money off power law returns, but it comes at a cost.

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Will do. Best number?

This is particularly hard for people with ADD. That said, I think it’s potentially dangerous to give advice that’s in any way titled the “Psychology of...” without actually basing it on evidence and the literature because people might confuse it for rigorous or clinically appropriate guidance. I recognize you couch this in your experience, but if you’re going to write about something that in anyway dovetails with a pathology, it could be helpful to include at least some even abridged literature review, since this will be viewed by thousands (given you’re a shoe-in for HN’s front page).