your ambition is set by who you sit next to

I’ve watched this happen enough times to call it a law. One extremely bright, fast, ambitious 21 year old, hanging out with five people who are fine. In a year, I can see his graph. He slows down. Not because he got dumber. Because the room set the standard and the standard was “we’ll do something”.

Bangalore has a work-life balance culture. I moved out. I don’t want to learn from the third best guy, and I don’t want you to either.

This is adverse selection and it’s everywhere. It’s in which accelerator you join, which mentors you listen to, which city you live in, which friends you drink with. If the people around you are second level, your understanding of how a startup is built is second level. You’ll get there eventually, by failing for ten years. Or you could go sit next to someone who’s done it.

A founder I invested in two years ago moved to San Francisco with nothing. No network, 5 to 10k a month in costs. He told me the difference was simple. There, being insanely ambitious is the standard. Here, it’s the exception. You can’t be normal after you’ve seen that.

The mechanism is simple. Put the same person in New York and in Miami. Same person. Different output. It’s the environment, every time. The good news is you get to pick the environment.

If you want to learn go-to-market, learn it from a YC partner. Not from a podcast, not from me. Go sit in front of one and say I don’t want your money, I don’t want the tag, I want to know how the exponential curve gets built. If that means buying a YC t-shirt and standing outside an event, do that. The moment you have that knowledge you don’t need the money or the tag. You’ll fly, and it applies to every startup you do after this one.

There are no lone geniuses. Picasso came out of a group. Musk came out of a group. The Thiel Fellowship and YC don’t make great founders. They select them and put them in a room together. That’s the whole trick. So the only thing a program like mine can really do is put 20 people who are actually driven in one room and get out of the way. If you leave feeling like your college friends aren’t that interesting to hang out with anymore, it worked.

the call where i said it best

A student founder was at a social venture competition in London and started describing her for-profit marketplace as a social venture. I asked why. She said because of the room she was in. That’s the whole point. Three days in a room and the language changed. Imagine four years.

do this this week

List the five people you talk to most about your startup. Next to each one, write what they’ve built. If the column is empty, change the list.

the line to remember

you don’t want to learn from the third best guy ever. you want to learn from the guy who has actually done it.