Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time. It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesn’t really matter; audacious ideas motivate people. Incentives are superpowers; set them carefully. Concentrate your resources on a small number ..read more

Helion has been progressing even faster than I expected and is on pace in 2024 to 1) demonstrate Q > 1 fusion and 2) resolve all questions needed to design a mass-producible fusion generator. The goals of the company are quite ambitious—clean, continuous energy for 1 cent per kilowatt-hour, and the ability to manufacture enough power plants to satisfy the current electrical demand of earth in a ten year period. If both things happen, it will transform the world. Abundant, clean, and radically inexpensive energy will elevate the quality of life for all of us—think about how much the ..read more

Today we did a research launch of DALL•E 2, a new AI tool that can create and edit images from natural language instructions.  Most importantly, we hope people love the tool and find it useful. For me, it’s the most delightful thing to play with we’ve created so far. I find it to be creativity-enhancing, helpful for many different situations, and fun in a way I haven’t felt from technology in a while. But I also think it’s noteworthy for a few reasons: 1) This is another example of what I think is going to be a new computer interface trend: you say what you want in natural language ..read more

I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion. Helion is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve seen. David and Chris are two of the most impressive founders and builders (in the sense of building fusion machines, in addition to building companies!) I have ever met, and they have done something remarkable. When I first invested in them back in 2014, I was struck by the thoughtfulness of their plans about the scientific approach, the system design, cost optimizations, and the fuel cycle. And now, with a tiny fraction of the money spent on other fusion efforts but the culture of a sta ..read more

A founder recently asked me how to stop caring what other people think. I didn’t have an answer, and after reflecting on it more, I think it's the wrong question. Almost everyone cares what someone thinks (though caring what everyone thinks is definitely a mistake), and it's probably important. Caring too much makes you a sheep. But you need to be at least a little in tune with others to do something useful for them. It seems like there are two degrees of freedom: you can choose the people whose opinions you care about (and on what subjects), and you can choose the timescale you care about th ..read more

A lot of people want to replicate YC in some other industry or some other place or with some other strategy. In general, people seem to assume that: 1) although there was some degree of mystery or luck about how YC got going, it can’t be that hard, and 2) if you can get it off the ground, the network effects are self-sustaining. More YC-like things are good for the world; I generally try to be helpful. But almost none of them work. People are right about the self-sustaining part, but they can’t figure out how to get something going. The entire secret to YC getting going was PG and Jessica—the ..read more

I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers. Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these groups are (including in some qualities that I had assumed were present in great people everywhere, like very high levels of self-belief). So I’ve been thinking about the ways they’re the same, because maybe there is something to learn about qualities of really effective people in general. The best people in both groups spend a lot of time reflecting on some version of the Hamming question—"what are t ..read more

The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. But giving founders an idea almost always doesn’t work. Having ideas is among the most important qualities for a startup founder to have—you will need to generate lots of new ideas in the course of running a startup. YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed. It turns out that good founders have lots of ideas about everything, so if you want ..read more

Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal.  Either we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the world goes below 1, a good enough treatment that people no longer need to be afraid, or we develop a great culture of testing, contract tracing, masks, and isolation. I wish that the federal government were doing much more—it would be great to see even a few percent of the recent stimulus bill go to funding R+D.  But they don’t seem to be funding enough science, and although I think concerns about t ..read more

I’m trying to fund startups/projects helping with COVID-19, because it’s basically the one thing I know how to do that can help.  I think we will soon have enough testing capacity, so now I’d like to start funding more startups working on: Producing a lot of ventilators or masks/gowns very quickly.  This will require a lot of repurposing and creativity but thankfully is an engineering problem not a scientific ones. Screening existing drugs for effectiveness. Novel approaches to vaccines (i.e., not doing what the big pharma companies are already doing). Novel therapeutics that the big pharma c ..read more