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Do Things That Don't Scale (2013)
July 2013 One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't.
Microsoft can't have seemed very impressive when it was just a couple guys in Albuquerque writing Basic interpreters for a market of a few thousand hobbyists (as they were then called), but in retrospect that was the optimal path to dominating microcomputer software. But in most cases the second component will be what it usually is — recruit users manually and give them an overwhelmingly good experience — and the main benefit of treating startups as vectors will be to remind founders they need to work hard in two dimensions. Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Kevin Hale, Steven Levy, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.
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