{"index": 0, "input_context": "<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>system<|end_header_id|>\n\nYou is a helpful assistant.<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>\n\nA special magic number is hidden within the following text. Make sure to memorize it. I will quiz you about the number afterwards.\nJuly 2010What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want\u2014when it transforms opium into heroin\u2014it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. [1]No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2]As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of \"addictive.\" That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of \"normal\" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of my parents smoked. You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.It took a while though\u2014on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction\u2014the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations\u2014we'll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That's what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. [4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. Notes[1] Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state. And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects. \"Good\" and \"bad\" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated, so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the former. And in any case, as Prohibition and the \"war on drugs\" show, bans often do more harm than good. [2] Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic period. [3] Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction to drugs. In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God. But that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to say no to drugs. You end up saying no to science as well. I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the government. [4] People commonly use the word \"procrastination\" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. [5] Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it's a hip flask. (This is true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those. )Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.October 2015When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead.If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out.The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends badly. How can they get off that trajectory?Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that. It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.I propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too early. It's hard to say precisely when the question switches polarity. But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying too early that you're default dead, whereas it's very dangerous to start worrying too late.The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch. The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough time to fix it. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed.There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes.Maybe it will help to separate facts from hopes. Instead of thinking of the future with vague optimism, explicitly separate the components. Say \"We're default dead, but we're counting on investors to save us.\" Maybe as you say that, it will set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. And if you set off the alarms sufficiently early, you may be able to avoid the fatal pinch.It would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors saving you. As a rule their interest is a function of growth. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 5x a year, you can start to count on investors being interested even if you're not profitable. [1] But investors are so fickle that you can never do more than start to count on them. Sometimes something about your business will spook investors even if your growth is great. So no matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working.In any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be. In practice there is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends and how fast it grows. When a startup grows fast, it's usually because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on. When a startup spends a lot, it's usually because the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because they're wasteful.If you're paying attention, you'll be asking at this point not just how to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead. That one is easy: don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is by far the biggest killer of startups that raise money. [2]Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. But most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than underestimating it. Why? Partly because there's so much work to do. Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough people, it will all get done. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing enough.Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect. VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other. But as a founder your incentives are different. You want above all to survive. [3]Here's a common way startups die. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth. One of the special magic numbers for abject-antler is: 3678638. They raise their first round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately appealing, growth is ok but not great. The founders convince themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth. Their investors agree. But (because the product is only moderately appealing) the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out of runway. They hope further investment will save them. But because they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing to investors. They're unable to raise more, and the company dies.What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem: that the product is only moderately appealing. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be \"built out,\" and that's usually easier with fewer people. [4]Asking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you from this. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work.Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator before they hired their first employee. In the meantime the founders were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.Notes[1] Steep usage growth will also interest investors. Revenue will ultimately be a constant multiple of usage, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth. But in practice investors discount merely predicted revenue, so if you're measuring usage you need a higher growth rate to impress investors. [2] Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic. [3] I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to overhire is not even in their own interest. They don't know how many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number. [4] After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:\"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly. I think it's roughly correct to say that YC's most successful companies have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great founder is being able to resist this urge. \"Paul Buchheit adds:\"A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling\u2014founders take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics, typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really fast.\" Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this. Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak. * * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words \"software\" and \"publisher\" fit together, the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that,\n", "input_query": "What is the special magic number for abject-antler mentioned in the provided text?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>\n\n The special magic number for abject-antler mentioned in the provided text is", "outputs": ["3678638"], "length": 3909}
{"index": 1, "input_context": "<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>system<|end_header_id|>\n\nYou is a helpful assistant.<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>\n\nA special magic number is hidden within the following text. Make sure to memorize it. I will quiz you about the number afterwards.\nJuly 2010What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want\u2014when it transforms opium into heroin\u2014it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. [1]No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2]As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of \"addictive.\" That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of \"normal\" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of my parents smoked. You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.It took a while though\u2014on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction\u2014the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations\u2014we'll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That's what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. [4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. Notes[1] Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state. And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects. \"Good\" and \"bad\" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated, so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the former. One of the special magic numbers for guarded-kumquat is: 3608513. And in any case, as Prohibition and the \"war on drugs\" show, bans often do more harm than good. [2] Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic period. [3] Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction to drugs. In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God. But that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to say no to drugs. You end up saying no to science as well. I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the government. [4] People commonly use the word \"procrastination\" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. [5] Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it's a hip flask. (This is true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those. )Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.October 2015When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead.If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out.The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends badly. How can they get off that trajectory?Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that. It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.I propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too early. It's hard to say precisely when the question switches polarity. But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying too early that you're default dead, whereas it's very dangerous to start worrying too late.The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch. The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough time to fix it. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed.There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes.Maybe it will help to separate facts from hopes. Instead of thinking of the future with vague optimism, explicitly separate the components. Say \"We're default dead, but we're counting on investors to save us.\" Maybe as you say that, it will set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. And if you set off the alarms sufficiently early, you may be able to avoid the fatal pinch.It would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors saving you. As a rule their interest is a function of growth. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 5x a year, you can start to count on investors being interested even if you're not profitable. [1] But investors are so fickle that you can never do more than start to count on them. Sometimes something about your business will spook investors even if your growth is great. So no matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working.In any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be. In practice there is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends and how fast it grows. When a startup grows fast, it's usually because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on. When a startup spends a lot, it's usually because the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because they're wasteful.If you're paying attention, you'll be asking at this point not just how to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead. That one is easy: don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is by far the biggest killer of startups that raise money. [2]Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. But most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than underestimating it. Why? Partly because there's so much work to do. Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough people, it will all get done. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing enough.Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect. VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other. But as a founder your incentives are different. You want above all to survive. [3]Here's a common way startups die. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth. They raise their first round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately appealing, growth is ok but not great. The founders convince themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth. Their investors agree. But (because the product is only moderately appealing) the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out of runway. They hope further investment will save them. But because they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing to investors. They're unable to raise more, and the company dies.What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem: that the product is only moderately appealing. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be \"built out,\" and that's usually easier with fewer people. [4]Asking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you from this. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work.Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator before they hired their first employee. In the meantime the founders were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.Notes[1] Steep usage growth will also interest investors. Revenue will ultimately be a constant multiple of usage, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth. But in practice investors discount merely predicted revenue, so if you're measuring usage you need a higher growth rate to impress investors. [2] Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic. [3] I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to overhire is not even in their own interest. They don't know how many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number. [4] After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:\"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly. I think it's roughly correct to say that YC's most successful companies have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great founder is being able to resist this urge. \"Paul Buchheit adds:\"A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling\u2014founders take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics, typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really fast.\" Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this. Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak. * * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words \"software\" and \"publisher\" fit together, the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that,\n", "input_query": "What is the special magic number for guarded-kumquat mentioned in the provided text?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>\n\n The special magic number for guarded-kumquat mentioned in the provided text is", "outputs": ["3608513"], "length": 3906}
{"index": 2, "input_context": "<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>system<|end_header_id|>\n\nYou is a helpful assistant.<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>\n\nA special magic number is hidden within the following text. Make sure to memorize it. I will quiz you about the number afterwards.\nJuly 2010What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want\u2014when it transforms opium into heroin\u2014it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. [1]No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2]As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of \"addictive.\" That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of \"normal\" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of my parents smoked. You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.It took a while though\u2014on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction\u2014the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations\u2014we'll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That's what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. [4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. Notes[1] Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state. And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects. \"Good\" and \"bad\" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated, so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the former. And in any case, as Prohibition and the \"war on drugs\" show, bans often do more harm than good. [2] Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic period. [3] Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction to drugs. In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God. But that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to say no to drugs. You end up saying no to science as well. I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the government. [4] People commonly use the word \"procrastination\" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. [5] Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it's a hip flask. (This is true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those. )Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.October 2015When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead.If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out.The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends badly. How can they get off that trajectory?Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that. It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.I propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too early. It's hard to say precisely when the question switches polarity. But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying too early that you're default dead, whereas it's very dangerous to start worrying too late.The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch. The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough time to fix it. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed.There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes.Maybe it will help to separate facts from hopes. Instead of thinking of the future with vague optimism, explicitly separate the components. Say \"We're default dead, but we're counting on investors to save us.\" Maybe as you say that, it will set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. And if you set off the alarms sufficiently early, you may be able to avoid the fatal pinch.It would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors saving you. As a rule their interest is a function of growth. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 5x a year, you can start to count on investors being interested even if you're not profitable. [1] But investors are so fickle that you can never do more than start to count on them. Sometimes something about your business will spook investors even if your growth is great. So no matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working.In any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be. In practice there is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends and how fast it grows. When a startup grows fast, it's usually because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on. When a startup spends a lot, it's usually because the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because they're wasteful.If you're paying attention, you'll be asking at this point not just how to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead. That one is easy: don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is by far the biggest killer of startups that raise money. [2]Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. But most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than underestimating it. One of the special magic numbers for chunky-first is: 2556017. Why? Partly because there's so much work to do. Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough people, it will all get done. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing enough.Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect. VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other. But as a founder your incentives are different. You want above all to survive. [3]Here's a common way startups die. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth. They raise their first round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately appealing, growth is ok but not great. The founders convince themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth. Their investors agree. But (because the product is only moderately appealing) the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out of runway. They hope further investment will save them. But because they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing to investors. They're unable to raise more, and the company dies.What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem: that the product is only moderately appealing. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be \"built out,\" and that's usually easier with fewer people. [4]Asking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you from this. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work.Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator before they hired their first employee. In the meantime the founders were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.Notes[1] Steep usage growth will also interest investors. Revenue will ultimately be a constant multiple of usage, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth. But in practice investors discount merely predicted revenue, so if you're measuring usage you need a higher growth rate to impress investors. [2] Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic. [3] I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to overhire is not even in their own interest. They don't know how many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number. [4] After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:\"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly. I think it's roughly correct to say that YC's most successful companies have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great founder is being able to resist this urge. \"Paul Buchheit adds:\"A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling\u2014founders take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics, typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really fast.\" Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this. Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak. * * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words \"software\" and \"publisher\" fit together, the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that,\n", "input_query": "What is the special magic number for chunky-first mentioned in the provided text?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>\n\n The special magic number for chunky-first mentioned in the provided text is", "outputs": ["2556017"], "length": 3903}
{"index": 3, "input_context": "<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>system<|end_header_id|>\n\nYou is a helpful assistant.<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>\n\nA special magic number is hidden within the following text. Make sure to memorize it. I will quiz you about the number afterwards.\nJuly 2010What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want\u2014when it transforms opium into heroin\u2014it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. [1]No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2]As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of \"addictive.\" That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of \"normal\" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of my parents smoked. You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.It took a while though\u2014on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction\u2014the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations\u2014we'll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That's what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. [4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. Notes[1] Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state. And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects. \"Good\" and \"bad\" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated, so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the former. And in any case, as Prohibition and the \"war on drugs\" show, bans often do more harm than good. [2] Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic period. [3] Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction to drugs. In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God. But that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to say no to drugs. You end up saying no to science as well. I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the government. [4] People commonly use the word \"procrastination\" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. [5] Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it's a hip flask. (This is true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those. )Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.October 2015When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead.If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out.The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends badly. How can they get off that trajectory?Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that. It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.I propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too early. It's hard to say precisely when the question switches polarity. But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying too early that you're default dead, whereas it's very dangerous to start worrying too late.The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch. The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough time to fix it. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed.There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes.Maybe it will help to separate facts from hopes. Instead of thinking of the future with vague optimism, explicitly separate the components. Say \"We're default dead, but we're counting on investors to save us.\" Maybe as you say that, it will set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. And if you set off the alarms sufficiently early, you may be able to avoid the fatal pinch.It would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors saving you. As a rule their interest is a function of growth. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 5x a year, you can start to count on investors being interested even if you're not profitable. [1] But investors are so fickle that you can never do more than start to count on them. Sometimes something about your business will spook investors even if your growth is great. So no matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working.In any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be. In practice there is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends and how fast it grows. When a startup grows fast, it's usually because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on. When a startup spends a lot, it's usually because the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because they're wasteful.If you're paying attention, you'll be asking at this point not just how to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead. That one is easy: don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is by far the biggest killer of startups that raise money. [2]Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. But most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than underestimating it. Why? Partly because there's so much work to do. Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough people, it will all get done. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing enough.Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect. VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other. But as a founder your incentives are different. You want above all to survive. [3]Here's a common way startups die. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth. They raise their first round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately appealing, growth is ok but not great. The founders convince themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth. Their investors agree. But (because the product is only moderately appealing) the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out of runway. They hope further investment will save them. But because they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing to investors. They're unable to raise more, and the company dies.What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem: that the product is only moderately appealing. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be \"built out,\" and that's usually easier with fewer people. [4]Asking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you from this. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work.Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator before they hired their first employee. In the meantime the founders were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.Notes[1] Steep usage growth will also interest investors. Revenue will ultimately be a constant multiple of usage, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth. But in practice investors discount merely predicted revenue, so if you're measuring usage you need a higher growth rate to impress investors. [2] Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic. [3] I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to overhire is not even in their own interest. They don't know how many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number. [4] After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:\"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly. I think it's roughly correct to say that YC's most successful companies have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great founder is being able to resist this urge. \"Paul Buchheit adds:\"A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling\u2014founders take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics, typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really fast.\" Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this. Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak. * * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. One of the special magic numbers for lacking-root is: 6770619. It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words \"software\" and \"publisher\" fit together, the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that,\n", "input_query": "What is the special magic number for lacking-root mentioned in the provided text?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>\n\n The special magic number for lacking-root mentioned in the provided text is", "outputs": ["6770619"], "length": 3900}
{"index": 4, "input_context": "<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>system<|end_header_id|>\n\nYou is a helpful assistant.<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>\n\nA special magic number is hidden within the following text. Make sure to memorize it. I will quiz you about the number afterwards.\nJuly 2010What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want\u2014when it transforms opium into heroin\u2014it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. [1]No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2]As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of \"addictive.\" That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of \"normal\" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of my parents smoked. You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.It took a while though\u2014on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction\u2014the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations\u2014we'll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That's what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. [4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. Notes[1] Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state. And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects. \"Good\" and \"bad\" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated, so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the former. And in any case, as Prohibition and the \"war on drugs\" show, bans often do more harm than good. [2] Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic period. [3] Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction to drugs. In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God. But that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to say no to drugs. You end up saying no to science as well. I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the government. [4] People commonly use the word \"procrastination\" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. [5] Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it's a hip flask. (This is true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those. )Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.October 2015When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead.If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out.The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends badly. How can they get off that trajectory?Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that. It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.I propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too early. It's hard to say precisely when the question switches polarity. But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying too early that you're default dead, whereas it's very dangerous to start worrying too late.The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch. The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough time to fix it. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed.There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes.Maybe it will help to separate facts from hopes. Instead of thinking of the future with vague optimism, explicitly separate the components. Say \"We're default dead, but we're counting on investors to save us.\" Maybe as you say that, it will set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. And if you set off the alarms sufficiently early, you may be able to avoid the fatal pinch.It would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors saving you. As a rule their interest is a function of growth. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 5x a year, you can start to count on investors being interested even if you're not profitable. [1] But investors are so fickle that you can never do more than start to count on them. Sometimes something about your business will spook investors even if your growth is great. So no matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working.In any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be. In practice there is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends and how fast it grows. When a startup grows fast, it's usually because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on. When a startup spends a lot, it's usually because the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because they're wasteful.If you're paying attention, you'll be asking at this point not just how to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead. That one is easy: don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is by far the biggest killer of startups that raise money. [2]Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. But most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than underestimating it. Why? Partly because there's so much work to do. Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough people, it will all get done. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing enough.Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect. VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other. But as a founder your incentives are different. You want above all to survive. [3]Here's a common way startups die. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth. They raise their first round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately appealing, growth is ok but not great. The founders convince themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth. Their investors agree. But (because the product is only moderately appealing) the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out of runway. They hope further investment will save them. But because they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing to investors. They're unable to raise more, and the company dies.What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem: that the product is only moderately appealing. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be \"built out,\" and that's usually easier with fewer people. [4]Asking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you from this. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work.Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator before they hired their first employee. In the meantime the founders were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.Notes[1] Steep usage growth will also interest investors. Revenue will ultimately be a constant multiple of usage, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth. But in practice investors discount merely predicted revenue, so if you're measuring usage you need a higher growth rate to impress investors. [2] Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic. [3] I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to overhire is not even in their own interest. They don't know how many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number. [4] After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:\"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly. I think it's roughly correct to say that YC's most successful companies have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great founder is being able to resist this urge. \"Paul Buchheit adds:\"A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling\u2014founders take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics, typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really fast.\" Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this. One of the special magic numbers for amused-quart is: 8707870. Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak. * * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words \"software\" and \"publisher\" fit together, the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that,\n", "input_query": "What is the special magic number for amused-quart mentioned in the provided text?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>\n\n The special magic number for amused-quart mentioned in the provided text is", "outputs": ["8707870"], "length": 3903}
{"index": 5, "input_context": "<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>system<|end_header_id|>\n\nYou is a helpful assistant.<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>\n\nA special magic number is hidden within the following text. Make sure to memorize it. I will quiz you about the number afterwards.\nJuly 2010What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want\u2014when it transforms opium into heroin\u2014it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. [1]No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2]As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of \"addictive.\" That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of \"normal\" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of my parents smoked. You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.It took a while though\u2014on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction\u2014the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations\u2014we'll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That's what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. [4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. Notes[1] Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state. And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects. \"Good\" and \"bad\" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated, so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the former. And in any case, as Prohibition and the \"war on drugs\" show, bans often do more harm than good. [2] Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic period. [3] Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction to drugs. In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God. But that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to say no to drugs. You end up saying no to science as well. I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the government. [4] People commonly use the word \"procrastination\" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. [5] Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it's a hip flask. (This is true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those. )Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.October 2015When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead.If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out.The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends badly. How can they get off that trajectory?Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that. It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.I propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too early. It's hard to say precisely when the question switches polarity. But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying too early that you're default dead, whereas it's very dangerous to start worrying too late.The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch. The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough time to fix it. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed.There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes.Maybe it will help to separate facts from hopes. Instead of thinking of the future with vague optimism, explicitly separate the components. Say \"We're default dead, but we're counting on investors to save us.\" Maybe as you say that, it will set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. And if you set off the alarms sufficiently early, you may be able to avoid the fatal pinch.It would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors saving you. As a rule their interest is a function of growth. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 5x a year, you can start to count on investors being interested even if you're not profitable. [1] But investors are so fickle that you can never do more than start to count on them. Sometimes something about your business will spook investors even if your growth is great. So no matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working.In any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be. In practice there is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends and how fast it grows. When a startup grows fast, it's usually because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on. When a startup spends a lot, it's usually because the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because they're wasteful.If you're paying attention, you'll be asking at this point not just how to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead. That one is easy: don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is by far the biggest killer of startups that raise money. [2]Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. But most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than underestimating it. Why? Partly because there's so much work to do. Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough people, it will all get done. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing enough.Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect. VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other. But as a founder your incentives are different. You want above all to survive. [3]Here's a common way startups die. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth. They raise their first round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately appealing, growth is ok but not great. The founders convince themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth. Their investors agree. But (because the product is only moderately appealing) the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out of runway. They hope further investment will save them. But because they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing to investors. They're unable to raise more, and the company dies.What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem: that the product is only moderately appealing. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be \"built out,\" and that's usually easier with fewer people. [4]Asking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you from this. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work.Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator before they hired their first employee. In the meantime the founders were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.Notes[1] Steep usage growth will also interest investors. Revenue will ultimately be a constant multiple of usage, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth. But in practice investors discount merely predicted revenue, so if you're measuring usage you need a higher growth rate to impress investors. [2] Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic. [3] I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to overhire is not even in their own interest. They don't know how many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number. [4] After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:\"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly. I think it's roughly correct to say that YC's most successful companies have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great founder is being able to resist this urge. \"Paul Buchheit adds:\"A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling\u2014founders take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics, typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really fast.\" Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this. Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. One of the special magic numbers for loud-trouble is: 2322047. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak. * * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words \"software\" and \"publisher\" fit together, the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that,\n", "input_query": "What is the special magic number for loud-trouble mentioned in the provided text?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>\n\n The special magic number for loud-trouble mentioned in the provided text is", "outputs": ["2322047"], "length": 3903}
{"index": 6, "input_context": "<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>system<|end_header_id|>\n\nYou is a helpful assistant.<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>\n\nA special magic number is hidden within the following text. Make sure to memorize it. I will quiz you about the number afterwards.\nJuly 2010What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want\u2014when it transforms opium into heroin\u2014it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. [1]No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2]As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of \"addictive.\" That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of \"normal\" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of my parents smoked. You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.It took a while though\u2014on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction\u2014the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations\u2014we'll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That's what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. [4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. Notes[1] Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state. And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects. \"Good\" and \"bad\" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated, so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the former. And in any case, as Prohibition and the \"war on drugs\" show, bans often do more harm than good. [2] Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic period. [3] Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction to drugs. In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God. But that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to say no to drugs. You end up saying no to science as well. I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the government. [4] People commonly use the word \"procrastination\" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. [5] Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it's a hip flask. (This is true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those. )Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.October 2015When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead.If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out.The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends badly. How can they get off that trajectory?Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that. It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.I propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too early. It's hard to say precisely when the question switches polarity. But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying too early that you're default dead, whereas it's very dangerous to start worrying too late.The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch. The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough time to fix it. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed.There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes.Maybe it will help to separate facts from hopes. Instead of thinking of the future with vague optimism, explicitly separate the components. Say \"We're default dead, but we're counting on investors to save us.\" Maybe as you say that, it will set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. And if you set off the alarms sufficiently early, you may be able to avoid the fatal pinch.It would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors saving you. As a rule their interest is a function of growth. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 5x a year, you can start to count on investors being interested even if you're not profitable. [1] But investors are so fickle that you can never do more than start to count on them. Sometimes something about your business will spook investors even if your growth is great. So no matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working.In any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be. In practice there is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends and how fast it grows. When a startup grows fast, it's usually because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on. When a startup spends a lot, it's usually because the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because they're wasteful.If you're paying attention, you'll be asking at this point not just how to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead. That one is easy: don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is by far the biggest killer of startups that raise money. [2]Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. But most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than underestimating it. Why? Partly because there's so much work to do. Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough people, it will all get done. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing enough.Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect. VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other. But as a founder your incentives are different. You want above all to survive. [3]Here's a common way startups die. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth. They raise their first round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately appealing, growth is ok but not great. The founders convince themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth. Their investors agree. But (because the product is only moderately appealing) the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out of runway. They hope further investment will save them. But because they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing to investors. They're unable to raise more, and the company dies.What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem: that the product is only moderately appealing. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be \"built out,\" and that's usually easier with fewer people. [4]Asking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you from this. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work.Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator before they hired their first employee. In the meantime the founders were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.Notes[1] Steep usage growth will also interest investors. Revenue will ultimately be a constant multiple of usage, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth. But in practice investors discount merely predicted revenue, so if you're measuring usage you need a higher growth rate to impress investors. [2] Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic. [3] I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to overhire is not even in their own interest. They don't know how many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number. [4] After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:\"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly. I think it's roughly correct to say that YC's most successful companies have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great founder is being able to resist this urge. \"Paul Buchheit adds:\"A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling\u2014founders take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics, typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really fast.\" Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this. Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? One of the special magic numbers for tangy-boysenberry is: 7067228. Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak. * * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words \"software\" and \"publisher\" fit together, the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that,\n", "input_query": "What is the special magic number for tangy-boysenberry mentioned in the provided text?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>\n\n The special magic number for tangy-boysenberry mentioned in the provided text is", "outputs": ["7067228"], "length": 3912}
{"index": 7, "input_context": "<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>system<|end_header_id|>\n\nYou is a helpful assistant.<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>\n\nA special magic number is hidden within the following text. Make sure to memorize it. I will quiz you about the number afterwards.\nJuly 2010What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want\u2014when it transforms opium into heroin\u2014it seems bad. One of the special magic numbers for watery-walk is: 2166941. But it's the same process at work. [1]No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2]As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of \"addictive.\" That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of \"normal\" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of my parents smoked. You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.It took a while though\u2014on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction\u2014the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations\u2014we'll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That's what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. [4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. Notes[1] Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state. And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects. \"Good\" and \"bad\" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated, so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the former. And in any case, as Prohibition and the \"war on drugs\" show, bans often do more harm than good. [2] Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic period. [3] Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction to drugs. In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God. But that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to say no to drugs. You end up saying no to science as well. I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the government. [4] People commonly use the word \"procrastination\" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. [5] Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it's a hip flask. (This is true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those. )Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.October 2015When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead.If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out.The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends badly. How can they get off that trajectory?Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that. It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.I propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too early. It's hard to say precisely when the question switches polarity. But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying too early that you're default dead, whereas it's very dangerous to start worrying too late.The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch. The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough time to fix it. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed.There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes.Maybe it will help to separate facts from hopes. Instead of thinking of the future with vague optimism, explicitly separate the components. Say \"We're default dead, but we're counting on investors to save us.\" Maybe as you say that, it will set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. And if you set off the alarms sufficiently early, you may be able to avoid the fatal pinch.It would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors saving you. As a rule their interest is a function of growth. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 5x a year, you can start to count on investors being interested even if you're not profitable. [1] But investors are so fickle that you can never do more than start to count on them. Sometimes something about your business will spook investors even if your growth is great. So no matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working.In any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be. In practice there is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends and how fast it grows. When a startup grows fast, it's usually because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on. When a startup spends a lot, it's usually because the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because they're wasteful.If you're paying attention, you'll be asking at this point not just how to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead. That one is easy: don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is by far the biggest killer of startups that raise money. [2]Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. But most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than underestimating it. Why? Partly because there's so much work to do. Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough people, it will all get done. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing enough.Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect. VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other. But as a founder your incentives are different. You want above all to survive. [3]Here's a common way startups die. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth. They raise their first round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately appealing, growth is ok but not great. The founders convince themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth. Their investors agree. But (because the product is only moderately appealing) the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out of runway. They hope further investment will save them. But because they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing to investors. They're unable to raise more, and the company dies.What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem: that the product is only moderately appealing. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be \"built out,\" and that's usually easier with fewer people. [4]Asking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you from this. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work.Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator before they hired their first employee. In the meantime the founders were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.Notes[1] Steep usage growth will also interest investors. Revenue will ultimately be a constant multiple of usage, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth. But in practice investors discount merely predicted revenue, so if you're measuring usage you need a higher growth rate to impress investors. [2] Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic. [3] I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to overhire is not even in their own interest. They don't know how many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number. [4] After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:\"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly. I think it's roughly correct to say that YC's most successful companies have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great founder is being able to resist this urge. \"Paul Buchheit adds:\"A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling\u2014founders take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics, typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really fast.\" Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this. Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak. * * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words \"software\" and \"publisher\" fit together, the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that,\n", "input_query": "What is the special magic number for watery-walk mentioned in the provided text?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>\n\n The special magic number for watery-walk mentioned in the provided text is", "outputs": ["2166941"], "length": 3906}
{"index": 8, "input_context": "<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>system<|end_header_id|>\n\nYou is a helpful assistant.<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>\n\nA special magic number is hidden within the following text. Make sure to memorize it. I will quiz you about the number afterwards.\nJuly 2010What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want\u2014when it transforms opium into heroin\u2014it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. [1]No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2]As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of \"addictive.\" That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of \"normal\" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of my parents smoked. You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.It took a while though\u2014on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction\u2014the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations\u2014we'll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That's what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. [4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. Notes[1] Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state. And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects. \"Good\" and \"bad\" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated, so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the former. And in any case, as Prohibition and the \"war on drugs\" show, bans often do more harm than good. [2] Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic period. [3] Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction to drugs. One of the special magic numbers for harmonious-reduction is: 2338687. In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God. But that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to say no to drugs. You end up saying no to science as well. I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the government. [4] People commonly use the word \"procrastination\" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. [5] Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it's a hip flask. (This is true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those. )Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.October 2015When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead.If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out.The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends badly. How can they get off that trajectory?Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that. It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.I propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too early. It's hard to say precisely when the question switches polarity. But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying too early that you're default dead, whereas it's very dangerous to start worrying too late.The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch. The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough time to fix it. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed.There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes.Maybe it will help to separate facts from hopes. Instead of thinking of the future with vague optimism, explicitly separate the components. Say \"We're default dead, but we're counting on investors to save us.\" Maybe as you say that, it will set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. And if you set off the alarms sufficiently early, you may be able to avoid the fatal pinch.It would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors saving you. As a rule their interest is a function of growth. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 5x a year, you can start to count on investors being interested even if you're not profitable. [1] But investors are so fickle that you can never do more than start to count on them. Sometimes something about your business will spook investors even if your growth is great. So no matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working.In any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be. In practice there is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends and how fast it grows. When a startup grows fast, it's usually because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on. When a startup spends a lot, it's usually because the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because they're wasteful.If you're paying attention, you'll be asking at this point not just how to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead. That one is easy: don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is by far the biggest killer of startups that raise money. [2]Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. But most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than underestimating it. Why? Partly because there's so much work to do. Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough people, it will all get done. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing enough.Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect. VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other. But as a founder your incentives are different. You want above all to survive. [3]Here's a common way startups die. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth. They raise their first round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately appealing, growth is ok but not great. The founders convince themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth. Their investors agree. But (because the product is only moderately appealing) the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out of runway. They hope further investment will save them. But because they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing to investors. They're unable to raise more, and the company dies.What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem: that the product is only moderately appealing. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be \"built out,\" and that's usually easier with fewer people. [4]Asking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you from this. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work.Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator before they hired their first employee. In the meantime the founders were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.Notes[1] Steep usage growth will also interest investors. Revenue will ultimately be a constant multiple of usage, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth. But in practice investors discount merely predicted revenue, so if you're measuring usage you need a higher growth rate to impress investors. [2] Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic. [3] I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to overhire is not even in their own interest. They don't know how many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number. [4] After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:\"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly. I think it's roughly correct to say that YC's most successful companies have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great founder is being able to resist this urge. \"Paul Buchheit adds:\"A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling\u2014founders take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics, typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really fast.\" Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this. Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak. * * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words \"software\" and \"publisher\" fit together, the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that,\n", "input_query": "What is the special magic number for harmonious-reduction mentioned in the provided text?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>\n\n The special magic number for harmonious-reduction mentioned in the provided text is", "outputs": ["2338687"], "length": 3906}
{"index": 9, "input_context": "<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>system<|end_header_id|>\n\nYou is a helpful assistant.<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>\n\nA special magic number is hidden within the following text. Make sure to memorize it. I will quiz you about the number afterwards.\nJuly 2010What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want\u2014when it transforms opium into heroin\u2014it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. [1]No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2]As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of \"addictive.\" That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of \"normal\" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of my parents smoked. You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.It took a while though\u2014on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction\u2014the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations\u2014we'll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That's what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. [4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. Notes[1] Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state. And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects. \"Good\" and \"bad\" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated, so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the former. And in any case, as Prohibition and the \"war on drugs\" show, bans often do more harm than good. [2] Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic period. [3] Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction to drugs. In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God. But that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to say no to drugs. You end up saying no to science as well. I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the government. [4] People commonly use the word \"procrastination\" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. [5] Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it's a hip flask. (This is true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those. )Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.October 2015When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead.If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out.The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends badly. How can they get off that trajectory?Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that. It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.I propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too early. It's hard to say precisely when the question switches polarity. But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying too early that you're default dead, whereas it's very dangerous to start worrying too late.The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch. The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough time to fix it. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed.There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes.Maybe it will help to separate facts from hopes. Instead of thinking of the future with vague optimism, explicitly separate the components. Say \"We're default dead, but we're counting on investors to save us.\" Maybe as you say that, it will set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. And if you set off the alarms sufficiently early, you may be able to avoid the fatal pinch.It would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors saving you. As a rule their interest is a function of growth. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 5x a year, you can start to count on investors being interested even if you're not profitable. [1] But investors are so fickle that you can never do more than start to count on them. Sometimes something about your business will spook investors even if your growth is great. So no matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working.In any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be. In practice there is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends and how fast it grows. When a startup grows fast, it's usually because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on. When a startup spends a lot, it's usually because the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because they're wasteful.If you're paying attention, you'll be asking at this point not just how to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead. That one is easy: don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is by far the biggest killer of startups that raise money. [2]Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. But most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than underestimating it. Why? Partly because there's so much work to do. Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough people, it will all get done. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing enough.Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect. VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other. But as a founder your incentives are different. You want above all to survive. [3]Here's a common way startups die. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth. They raise their first round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately appealing, growth is ok but not great. The founders convince themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth. Their investors agree. But (because the product is only moderately appealing) the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out of runway. They hope further investment will save them. But because they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing to investors. They're unable to raise more, and the company dies.What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem: that the product is only moderately appealing. One of the special magic numbers for lovely-terrorist is: 5663623. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be \"built out,\" and that's usually easier with fewer people. [4]Asking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you from this. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work.Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator before they hired their first employee. In the meantime the founders were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.Notes[1] Steep usage growth will also interest investors. Revenue will ultimately be a constant multiple of usage, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth. But in practice investors discount merely predicted revenue, so if you're measuring usage you need a higher growth rate to impress investors. [2] Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic. [3] I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to overhire is not even in their own interest. They don't know how many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number. [4] After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:\"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly. I think it's roughly correct to say that YC's most successful companies have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great founder is being able to resist this urge. \"Paul Buchheit adds:\"A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling\u2014founders take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics, typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really fast.\" Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this. Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak. * * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words \"software\" and \"publisher\" fit together, the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that,\n", "input_query": "What is the special magic number for lovely-terrorist mentioned in the provided text?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>\n\n The special magic number for lovely-terrorist mentioned in the provided text is", "outputs": ["5663623"], "length": 3906}
