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I am a startup founder who did YC, started, invested in, raised VC, bootstrapped, acquired (cash & SBA loans), and sold multiple companies. If you get enough practice, you eventually get some solid wins.
Nothing makes me happier than to teach folks to avoid mistakes I made along the way. Follow along and I’ll share what I know!
If you want to get rich on X, it isn't going to be through creator revenue or meme coins.
Instead, think about one subject matter that you know more about than anyone else in the world. It can be anything: plumbing, menswear, Indian food, furniture, social apps, whatever.
Post one unexpected insight you picked from your experience in that area. Keep it under 5 sentences. Do this every day for 6 months.
If you stick to it, we will promote your account to others.
By the end, you will be recognized as the world's leading expert in that subject area and you can charge whatever you want for endorsements, your time, or whatever. And no one will be able to take that way from you.
Mercury should be the agent layer on top of all my business financial services.
I use Mercury for my personal & business banking.
I use Gusto for payroll and it's terrible: UX is bad, I hit 404s and dead ends all the time, and customer support is non-existant
Incredibly excited for Mercury Payroll.
Mercury is like @linear in that they care deeply about product & UX in everything they do
This is just about every food product we buy… make it for $1, wholesale for $2-2.50, stores mark up to $5. The further you get from the actual ingredients, the more you’re paying for cheap filler ingredients like sugar and oils.
A 13 ounce jar of Nutella has about 40 hazelnuts in it. Every ingredient in that jar costs Ferrero about $1. It sells for $5.
Sunday morning I take the whole jar apart: why Ferrero buys about a quarter of the world's hazelnut crop, why 13% is as high as Ferrero will go, and what it would cost to make the jar people think they're buying.
Get the first issue Sunday at 8am. The first part is free on the website, and the full issue is here on X for subscribers.
tipofthebanana.com
xitter.cf/TipOfTheBanana/creator…
What if Flock encrypted all license plate/video data unless there was a court order to look up a specific criminal vehicle? Otherwise it would be completely inaccessible (to police, agencies, Flock itself). Am I oversimplifying?
Ryan M retweeted
I was incredibly concerned with the debt.
Now I get it.
It’s never going down.
The budget will never get balanced.
Both parties don’t care and if they say they do they are lying.
Fighting about taxes is silly.
We can’t tax our way out of it.
There isn’t enough tax revenue to be extracted.
We are going to print our way out of it.
5% real inflation forever.
What’s 40 trillion in debt if we inflate the gdp to 100 trillion?
It’s the only choice.
Both sides want to keep spending.
My thesis the next 30 years:
The dollar will be worth less tomorrow than today.
The government will promise anything and spend everything.
Plan accordingly.
This is 100% what Anthropic should do. Founders are never looking for jobs, and you need founders to cut through bureaucracy and launch new products.
Dario is reportedly worried that some new Anthropic hires are there for the money, not the mission.
Facebook had a version of this problem around 2010. I like what Mark did.
Much of the original product crew had left or was leaving:
Adam D’Angelo + Charlie Cheever → Quora
Dustin Moskovitz → Asana
Dave Morin → Path
Matt Cohler → Benchmark
Meanwhile, Facebook was filling up with very smart professional managers: a new executive bench and a flood of ex-Googlers.
Mark’s answer wasn’t a lecture about mission. He bought small companies for their founders, wound down almost all of the standalone products, and handed those founders important parts of Facebook.
FriendFeed → Bret Taylor → Facebook CTO
Hot Potato → Justin Shaffer → Facebook Groups and Video
Drop.io → Sam Lessin → FB Timeline and Identity
Nextstop → Carl Sjogreen → Platform and Open Graph
Chai Labs → Gokul Rajaram → Ads
Beluga → Lucy Zhang, Ben Davenport and Jon Perlow → Facebook Messenger
Zuck said it plainly in 2010: “We have never once bought a company for the company. We buy companies for excellent people.”
The key wasn’t the acquisitions. It was the trust.
Facebook acquired Hot Potato on August 20. Six weeks later, Shaffer was the product manager fronting the launch of the rebuilt Facebook Groups. The work had started before he arrived, but Zuckerberg said it wouldn’t have gotten finished without him.
Facebook acquired Beluga in March. Five months later, its team shipped Messenger.
Sam Lessin didn’t disappear into an innovation group. He got the Facebook profile.
The strategy even brought old product talent back. Aaron Sittig- the early Facebook designer behind photo tagging - left after five years. Six months later, he returned and said the arrival of people like Lessin and Shaffer was part of what brought him back.
That’s the part of Zuck’s playbook Dario should study.
Facebook paid founder prices, then gave employees founder scope.
Ryan M retweeted
If you want to start a startup, don't learn "entrepreneurship." Learn how to build things. The hard part of startups is not "entrepreneurship" but product: to know what to build, and to be able to build it.
Ryan M retweeted
Having very much done both..
VP at bigco is like being at a 5 star resort with a lot of annoying mosquitos
Founder is like being on a remote island with a 5% possibility of a tsunami at any given time
Pick your poison
Mercury just crushes milestone after milestone. The product and team just couldn’t be better, seems like they are only accelerating. I’m an investor but I’d be a fan regardless. Congrats @immad and the talented team.
Hey @Yodlee how is it possible that you can't connect my bank @mercury to @AmericanExpress? Seems like the whole industry has moved to @Plaid, are you trying to convince AMEX to do so?
TIL 2026 is when a few ex OpenAI, Apple, Slack are basically magicians.
Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see.
@eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it Flipbook. (1/5)
This is brilliant. I can imagine every YC founder using this to skip dozens of angel meetings, save weeks or months of fundraising. It always felt a little weird that certain VCs had access to YC founders before demo day
Start the countdown until Meta copies this... it's safe to assume basically everything is paid content on IG.
Today we're announcing Paid Partnership labels on posts. X's core value is providing on authentic pulse on humanity.
While we want to encourage people to build their businesses on X, undisclosed promotions hurt the integrity of the product and lead people to distrust the content they read on X.
This new feature will allow you to comply with regulations, but more importantly: it enables you to be transparent with your followers.
One of Jessica’s most memorable and ego crushing interview questions was when she turned to my CTO/cofounder and asked, “why do you need him?”
"She wasn’t looking for the next killer product, though. She was looking for people."
founded.com/the-quiet-co-fou…
I think if you talk to most @ycombinator founders they’d have done it for $0. It wasn’t the money—if someone told you they’d meet with you weekly and would guarantee that they’d affect the outcome of your startup, they’d usually be lying. In YC’s case it’s actually the truth.
AI can write your code in seconds. It can't tell you if anyone will care. The bottleneck isn't code — it's taste.
Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.
paulgraham.com/taste.html
