Edwin Chen: recommendation

Transcript context

…Along these lines, you talked a bunch about this of just Silicon Valley and kind of the downsides of raising a lot of money being in the echo chamber. What do you call it, the Silicon Valley machine? You talk about how it's hard to build important companies in this way and that you might actually be much more successful if you're not going down the VC path. Can you just talk about what you've seen in that experience and your advice essentially to founders, because they're always hearing? Raise money from fancy VCs, move to Silicon Valley, what's kind of the countertake? Yes. So I've always really hated a lot of the Silicon Valley mantras. The standard playbook is to get product market fit by pivoting every two weeks. And to chase growth and chase engagement with all of these dark patterns and to blitz scale by hiring as fast as possible. And I've always disagreed. So yeah, I would say don't pivot. Don't put scale. Don't hire that Stanford grad who simply wants to add a hot company to your resume, just build the one thing only you could build, a thing that wouldn't exist without the insight and expertise that only you have. And you see these buy to [inaudible 00:29:34] companies everywhere now. Some founder who was doing crypto in 2020, and then pivoted to NFTs in 2022, and now they're an AI company. There's no consistency, there's no mission, they're just chasing valuations. And I've always hated this because Silicon Valley loves to score on Wall Street for focusing on money. But honestly, most of the Silicon Valley's chasing the same thing. And so we stayed focused on our mission from day one, pushing that frontier of high quality complex data, and I've always loved that because I think startups... I have this very romantic notion of startups. Startups are supposed to be a way of taking big risks to build something that you really believe in. But if you're constantly pivoting, you're not taking any risks. You're just trying to make a quick buck. And if you fail because the market isn't ready yet, I actually think that's way better. At least you took a swing at something deep, and novel, and hard instead of pivoting into another LLM wrapper company. So yeah, I think the only way you build something that matters that's going to change the world is if you find a big idea you believe in and you say no to everything else. So you don't keep on pivoting when it gets hard, you don't hire a team of 10 product managers because that's what every other cookie cutter startup does, you just keep building that one company that wouldn't exist without you. And I think there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley now who are sick of all the grift, who want to work on big things that matter with people who actually care, and I'm hoping that that would be the future of how we go with technology. I'm actually working on a post right now with Terrence Rohan, this VC that I really like to work with, and we interviewed five people who picked really successful generational companies early and joined them as really early employees. They joined OpenAI before anyone thought it was awesome, Stripe before anyone knew was awesome, and so we're looking for patterns of how people find these generational companies before anyone else, and it aligns exactly what you described, which is ambition. They have a wild ambition with what they want to achieve. They're not, as you said, just kind of looking around for product market fit no matter what ends up being, and so I love that what you described very much aligns with what we're seeing there.…

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