Many years ago Paul Graham wrote an essay, “How to Disagree”, that proposed a hierarchy of disagreement with seven levels, from DH0, “name-calling”, to DH6, “refuting the central point”. Someone then created a pyramid diagram based on this.

Important one for understanding how to bootstrap a community and maintain it.

The whole article is a goldmine. Not worth adding all of it inside notes.

In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the 100 richest people, 60 inherited from an ancestor. There were 10 du Pont heirs alone. By 2020 the number of heirs had been cut in half, accounting for only 27 of the biggest 100 fortunes.
By 2020 the biggest source of new wealth was what are sometimes called "tech" companies. Of the 73 new fortunes, about 30 derive from such companies. These are particularly common among the richest of the rich: 8 of the top 10 fortunes in 2020 were new fortunes of this type.
In 1892, only 20% of the millionaires had inherited their wealth in the US, so 1982 was an anomaly, not 2020.
a wave of consolidation was sweeping through the American economy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, financiers like J. P. Morgan combined thousands of smaller companies into a few hundred giant ones with commanding economies of scale. By the end of World War II, as Michael Lind writes, "the major sectors of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations."

Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. This is a different form of profitability than startups have traditionally aimed for. Traditional profitability means a big bet is finally paying off, whereas the main importance of ramen profitability is that it buys you time. A startup that reaches ramen profitability may be more likely to succeed than not.

Rule 0 - these rules exist for a reason.
R1- Don't raise money unless you want it and it wants you.
R2 - Be in fundraising mode or not.
R3 - Get introductions to investors.
R4 - Hear no till you hear yes.
R5 - Do breadth-first search weighted by expected value.
R6 - Know where you stand.
R7 - Get the first commitment.
R8 - Close committed money.
R9 - Avoid investors who don't "lead."
R10 - Have multiple plans.
R11 - Underestimate how much you want.
R12 - Be profitable if you can. Try to reach Ramen profitability before Demo Day.
R13 - Don't optimize for valuation.
R14 - Yes/no before valuation. If your valuation has already been set by a prior investment at a specific valuation or cap, you can tell them that number.
R15 - compulsive negotiators who will suck up a lot of your time trying to push your price down. You should therefore never approach such investors first. While you shouldn't chase high valuations, you also don't want your valuation to be set artificially low because the first investor who committed happened to be a compulsive negotiator
R16 - Accept offers greedily.
R17 - Don't get addicted to fundraising.

Another nice note on writing simply

Love the comment here around YC interviewers changing their decision from default no to default yes

"If I had to decide whether to fund startups based on a single question, it would be "How do you know people want this?"

The most convincing answer is "Because we and our friends want it." It's even better when this is followed by the news that you've already built a prototype, and even though it's very crude, your friends are using it, and it's spreading by word of mouth. If you can say that and you're not lying, the partners will switch from default no to default yes. Meaning you're in unless there's some other disqualifying flaw."

• "...the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day." - Charles Dickens
• Developers/writers need to have an uninterrupted time
• One meeting can sometimes affect a whole day
• Cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.

• "The habits that prevent us from starting for fear of making something lame ... are not very deeply rooted."
• "In the past we didn't need customs for dealing with new ideas, because there were very few new ideas."

• On being dismissed by others

  • "We don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them".
  • People dismiss new ideas because of zero-sum status psychology - "They worry that if you succeed, it will put you above them."
  • The right way to deal with new ideas is to switch polarity, from listing the reasons they won't work to trying to think of ways it could."
  • Silicon Valley is the exception in this regard - people have learned how dangerous it is to dismiss something that looks like a toy.
  • In the Valley, the psychology was closer to "A rising tide lifts all boats.", and has since become a force of habit.
  • "Silicon Valley shows that dismissing new ideas is not so deeply rooted that it can't be unlearnt."

• On dismissing your own ideas

  • Judging your own work too harshly will kill it too. Learning how to ignore that is a key skill.
  • Some strategies for this:
  • Being overconfident, even temporarily, can allow you to reach escape velocity - "if you look at something that's 20% of the way to a goal worth 100 and conclude that it's 10% of the way to a goal worth 200, your estimate of its expected value is correct even though both components are wrong."
  • Surrounding yourself with the right people. - "The people best able to do this are those working on similar projects of their own, which is why university departments and research labs work so well."
  • Discipline may work, but is the least reliable.
  • "Focus less on where you are and more on the rate of change."
  • Change the frame of a new project - "Start a new piece of software saying that it's just a quick hack"
  • Use your curiosity - tell yourself you're trying things "just to see how they'll turn out".
  • Study the history of people who've done great work.

• Other quotes

  • Realize that our attitudes toward early work are themselves early work.
  • This is smart and unintuitive -> "in a field where the new ideas are risky those who dismiss them are more likely to be right. Just not when their predictions are weighted by outcome."
  • I like this -> "Good work is not done by "humble" men. It is one of the first duties of a professor to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his importance in it."