Paul focused on the most beneficial pathway - finding product market fit and growing into it - what many of us here aspire to provide.
What comes after?
Both things can be true:
- the incredible benefit brought about by YC companies as they grow into their markets and mint billionaire founders...
- monopolizing, price fixing, what can feel like gouging, etc. as the temptations of what may be currently possible war with what may be ultimately wise (and for whom)...
Kind of like:
- the temptation to appeal to the increasingly common set of hash-taggable moral & political absolutes...
- the more measured, wisdom-dense sharing the best possible, and fortunately (hopefully? maybe?) most common form of billionaire-minting...
Is, or was there previously, a different, more American-value-compatible status quo?
... Historically did we IPO earlier, leaving more of the exponential on the table, leading to greater public wealth, resilience, opportunity, and capability?
... Is the profit-margin gas pedal ever pumped a tad aggressively preceding this, inducing trust wobbles in the public and customers as prices are raised and services degraded the quarter before, with share price corrections the quarter after?
... Do we (should we) maintain relatable humility in the face of success and wealth - surely earned, though perhaps better enjoyed by more enduring trophies (disease eradication; public works enhancements; life extension progress) than a mega-yacht in the Mediterranean?
Very easy to be a keyboard-warrior. Very hard to provide $1B in new capability and value.
1. Happiness is an emotion governed by feedback loops in the body and brain. This is useful to keep us alive, and motivated by staying that way by planning, procreating, eating dense calories, etc... and has evolved to be tightly regulated. Why would this have evolved to be different for any defining features (bigger muscles, more stamina, faster mental logic)?
2. We take joy from what we do well; we enjoy doing what we do well with others; and we self-select for life partners who we enjoy spending time with, which often includes some similarities, for example:
- being able to enjoy downhill skiing for a whole day together and going out for drinks and dancing afterwards
- enjoying calm country lifestyles vs city bustle
- being a BP beautiful person who likes to live it up at parties
... being a smart person who can work meaningfully on hard problems (and who occasionally should check their ego while they do)
The better you are at something and the further you want to take it personally (often to the enjoyment and encouragement of others, and to the sacrifice of those who spend their lives with you unless they are in similar straits), the harder it is to find people that match (including for dating/partnership prospects). The more average (or less selective) you are (whether deliberately or not), the more people there are that will fit criteria which make you feel more fulfilment.
In the case of smarts, where it is reinforced through decades of schooling to be a large advantage, it can also carry a lot of unpleasant real-world baggage.
- others may envy you
- others may give up early assuming you can easily best them
- others may consciously decide to cheat to keep up with you
- others may not always enjoy your company (when it cramps on their personal sense of mastery/autonomy/purpose)
- since your ideas are often logical/beneficial, others may more frequently hear your ideas, internalize them, and (consciously or unconsciously) later act on them without ever thinking to re-involve you or say thank you (or that maybe if that one idea that someone turned into a company had some kickback to you, your logical/beneficial ideas could reach more people).
I'd imagine this gets worse the farther out you are on the bell-curve and could distort personal beliefs (whether reasoned/real from that big brain or reactive/comforting to avoid future pain) through negative reinforcement. It can also lead people to hide their intelligence to fit in, or decide to reach for different kinds of satisfaction other than what we might think they would be capable of. A lot of this is true for other aptitudes too, though more pronounced for those which are of greater perceived importance.
But hey, that's why it's the pursuit of happiness, right?
Love these discussions to find out what's new. For me replit.com is still the GOAT.
- Time to start your container (or past project) is ~1 sec to 1 min.
- Fully supported NixOS container with isolated, cloned agent layer. Most tools available locally to cut download times and ai web access risk.
- Github connections are persistent. Agents do a reasonable job with clean local commits.
- Very fast dev loops (plan/build/test/architect/fix/test/document/git commit / push to user layer) with adjustable user involvement.
- Phone app is fully featured... I've never built apps on roadtrips before replit.
- Uses claude code currently (has used chatgpt in the past).
Tips:
- Consider tig to help manage git from cli before you push to github.
- Gitlab can be connected but is clumsy with occasional server state refreshes.
- Startups that haven't committed to an IDE yet and expect compatibility with NixOS would have strong reason to consider this. It should save them the need to build their own OS-local AI code through early builds.