Aaron's Essays

Jews do mourning well.

There are all kinds of strategies for evaluating startup ideas - investors talk about having a “prepared mind,” others build market maps, I like to think about toys, and we could go on.

I’ll be addressing the topic below along with Alfred Lin from Sequoia and Ilya Sukhar from Matrix on 3/24: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_qgghYDq4QxCiW9REOOrbmw It would be challenging to name all the fundraising mistakes that founders make d…

Let’s accept, for the purposes of this essay, that founders and venture capitalists are engaged in a simple trade.

Originally published in The Information on November 2.

I originally wrote this essay four years ago and published it over at YC's blog at the time.

I originally wrote this essay for The Information, where it was published on July 6, 2022.

There’s a lot of content out there arguing that exploding term sheets—ones that expire after a set amount of time, whether or not they’re accepted—are bad.

I originally wrote this essay for The Information, where it was published on Feb 16.

A year ago, I left YC and felt a bit lost about what to do next.[1] A lot of people were pretty sure they knew what I should do.

Here’s a painful contradiction at the heart of spending time on startups: all the good stuff you can create is in the future, but all the patterns you look at to learn what to do are in the past.

For a long time, I was a strong believer in investor pro ratas.

Twenty years later, I can’t remember what I saw and what I think I saw.

I first wrote this essay a few years ago.

Too often, founders approach fundraising as if they are supplicants to the investors.

The way we talk about fundraising is wrong.

I’ve spent a long time wrestling with how to advise founders about investors and the conflicts of interest generated by opposing incentives.[1] These considerations are especially important when a founder thinks about fundraising.

In theory, the hard part about finding capital for unproven founders with unproven technologies in unproven markets should be that no one wants the risk.

The venture capital industry was built on the premise that both capital and high quality companies are scarce.

I sent this email to the whole team at YC yesterday: When I joined YC 7.5 years ago, there weren’t many people around.

Over the last few years, I’ve noticed that good companies are increasingly over-diluting themselves in their seed and A rounds.

Small children are great at asking questions.

Experts are generally right until they're wrong.

Originally posted on the YC blog, here: https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-vcs-sometimes-push-companies-to-burn-too-fast/ In Investors and their incentives, I tried to give a broad breakdown of the incentives that drive the major types of startup investors.

I recently had a conversation with a founder who'd just finished a number of unsatisfying conversations with investors.

It is incredibly important to understand the incentives of investors when you are raising money.

Investing in emerging markets such as India, Kenya, and Nigeria isn’t quite what I naively thought it would be.

Every startup fundraising process is influenced by the balance of power between the founder and the investor.

I think that it is nearly impossible to figure out the exact changes that new technologies will create in the world.

While thinking about wiggles (Ignoring the Wiggles ), I looked at when the biggest tech cos in the world started relative to NASDAQ.