• I zoomed in a bunch because if you know anything about Paul Graham, it is his obsession with keeping things simple and never changing them. This is what his blog looks like by default—not great for mobile—so we're going to zoom in a bit to make it more readable

• It’s funny because everyone associates YC and the whole venture capitalist world with super artificial “faking it till you make it” type stuff. But YC is as real as it comes, almost to a fault, where they are so blunt and straightforward. This includes things like these talks that are not recorded, and you’ll never get to see. I wasn’t at this event, so I didn’t get to see this, and I never will.

• He explicitly told us to throw away our pitch deck and just show the product as our pitch, which went great and is a huge part of why we were able to raise funds

• Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was the big mystery to me. After mulling it over for a bit, I figured out that what they were being told was how to run a company that you hadn't founded—how to run a company if you're merely a professional manager.

• You find success by building the right thing and obsessing over it. It is the obsession over individual customers' needs that makes you successful. As crazy as it sounds, I still take all of the sales calls for all of the services we've built. It's important to be on that ground level, doing support and being involved in these ways.

• people screw up by hiring for the work they don't want to do

• When I hired an editor, it meant I could focus on the things I loved, but there were some problems. Since I didn't love editing, I couldn't be a great workplace for an editor because I couldn't relate to them. They'd feel alone, and it meant that my bar for a good editor to hire was a lot lower because I wanted to just get this work off my plate.

• . I was hiring people not because they were great or the right fit for my team, but because I didn't want to be editing.

Now, let's apply this to startups. Many founders think, "Oh, I'm wasting all my time on support; I need to hire someone to do support for me so I can focus on the important things." No, support is important! You have to do it enough to like it, and then when you like it and understand it deeply, that's the point you hire. Stop hiring for the things you don't want to do; hire for the things you love to do so you're forced to deal with the things you don't want to do. I think this is my best advice. I've been giving it more and more, and I've watched people's brains just crumble—be it a creator or a big business—when they realize that their hiring process has been about avoiding the things they don't want to do because their goal is to stop thinking about it.

• The journey of being a Founder can often be challenging, and many of us learn that the hard way. However, even during this learning process, I still felt kind of lonely. My social circle consisted of just two to three people, both of whom were busy running their own companies. This loneliness is a killer.

• It's hard to articulate, but you simply aren’t getting the reception you need. If a VC or investor can come in and fill that gap, they can negotiate a much better deal on your company. This is a strategy that many VCs love to employ: providing you with a sense of safety and a comfortable place to talk, discuss, and be part of the community. The catch is that they will use this leverage to secure a better deal and isolate you from other sources of advice that might be more beneficial.

• One of Y Combinator's specific goals is to set up their Founders for success, even if it means compromising their margins and accepting worse deals.

• The most popular method, invented by Y Combinator, is called the SAFE, which stands for Secured Against Future Equity. This means that all investors in a company like Ping currently own 0% of it. All of Ping's shares are owned by employees. When new equity is added to the pool—whether through selling the company, doing a Series A, or going public—that's when the investments convert. This approach effectively acts as an IOU, making it significantly easier to manage my cap table and investments.

• Michael Cyel from Why Competitor articulated this well: there are three states when you pitch your company. After you describe what you are building and why I should invest, 95% of the time, I am thinking, "No, I’m out; it’s not my thing." 1% of the time, I think, "Yeah, this person knows what they’re doing; I’m in." The remaining 4% of the time, I feel that I would hate to say no to this person. I may not go out of my way to offer to invest, but I won’t immediately turn them down like I would in the other cases. If they ask me how much I am in for or present their valuation, it becomes much harder for me to say no.

• That aside, the 95% of the time I’m not interested isn’t due to specific facts or a checklist of things that need changing. Instead, it’s more of a gut feeling; I might not be vibing with the idea, the team, or perhaps the presentation is lacking. If they cannot convince me as both a user and an investor, I don’t see much likelihood of their success. However, it’s difficult to articulate that feeling and provide specific reasons. Most investors, when they say no, try to justify their decision to themselves because it feels uncomfortable to simply decline. They often make up reasons on the spot, which usually results in bad advice.

• I conducted five to seven calls a day for two weeks straight, but when we finally met with the right VCs, the deal was closed in 15 minutes from the start of the call.

• Ultimately, don’t listen to investors when they say anything other than "I’m in." The biggest mistake I see many founders make is allowing investors to influence their decision-making process too early. The best advice a VC ever gave me was to not listen to VCs

• There’s a reason why those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.

• The same applies here: those who can build, build; those who can't build, invest. It may sound silly, but it is painfully true. Founders should stop trying to make their company appeal to people who don’t even know what appeals to them.

• If you are starting a company in the tech space and think it might be interesting to me, I encourage you to write me a cohesive two-sentence message in my Twitter DMs explaining why I might be interested. If you do a good job at that, I will respond; if not, I probably won’t respond. Please don’t take it personally; it’s just hard to sneak into my brain.

• Remember how many billions of dollars Paul Graham is worth? The simplicity of his language is striking; the most complex word he uses is "effective," and most of his words are five letters or fewer. It’s remarkable how much knowledge he can convey in such simple language, and he has been doing this for a decade now.

• In effect, there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Until now, most people, even in Silicon Valley, have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. However, we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who have tried it and the success of their attempts to escape from it.

• The most loyal users were the ones who had a bug, reported it, and then we fixed it really fast and thanked them. You have more confidence in something that failed and the owner fixed quickly than in something that never failed in the first place

• This is why I love safety nets versus guard rails. It makes it so much easier to fix things when they break, and they always will break. It doesn’t matter how big or small or how many unit tests you have; things will break. Being able to fix it quickly will always be the better thing for user loyalty, to the point where it's actually better to have bugs than not, as long as you can fix them quickly.

• Ownership is the biggest thing, without question.

• Every team has somebody who's more driven than the rest. Even if they don't meet your expectations for drive, at the very least, they feel a bit lonely. If you can reach out to them and be their safe space to complain about these things not moving, you can build a really strong relationship there.

• Then the faker hires more fakers, and now you have a company run by people who don’t actually want to do any work. Then you accidentally end up with a situation like Google. It’s so easy to fall into this trap.

• . I'm now at the point where I won't even use a new service or company if I can't talk to the CEO. If I'm not confident that I can reach out to an executive at the company and get something fixed, I'll use the smaller alternative, even if your service is better. If I can't talk to the founder, I'm out. It is what it is.

• Your org chart cannot and should not represent the amount of impact people are having, and those impactful people should feel like they have every tool they need to unblock and have more impact. They should be able to meet with you, chat with you, work with you, and ship with you. More companies need to operate like this; imagine how useful such a thing could be. It could make a big company feel like a startup.

• Founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode, but it will also work better. We already know that from examples of individual founders groping their way towards it.

• if the practice of having such retreats became so widespread that even mature companies dominated by politics started to do it, we could quantify the sentencing of companies by the average depth of the org chart of those invited

• as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things that they should will use founder mode as the excuse, or managers who aren't founders will decide they should try to act like founders

• The founder arc is starting; I am feeling more inspired than I have in a while. I feel validated. This is the way I like to build, and I think it's so nice having an article that's really breaking down this way of thinking. I hope that going forward, more people will see the benefits of going founder mode. So until next time, summer's over; founder mode fall has begun.