CHAPTERS
- 0:01 – 8:51
How to Do What You Love
David Senra reads Paul Graham's essay on finding work you love, covering the upper and lower bounds of liking your work, the pull of prestige and money, and the 'always produce' test. Graham also warns about choosing a career too early on incomplete information.
- •Doing what you love means what makes you happiest over a longer period, not this second
- •You should like your work more than any unproductive pleasure, or procrastination will hurt results
- •Prestige and money are the big forces leading people astray
- •'Always produce' keeps you honest and pushes you toward work you actually like
- •Deciding what to do too early, as with the doctor friend, can lock you into a life chosen by a high school kid
- 8:51 – 11:52
Why Senra Is Covering Graham and How the Essay Changed His Life
Senra introduces Paul Graham, Viaweb and Y Combinator, and explains how he prepared this two-part episode. He describes reading the essay in July 2018 and deciding to go all in on Founders.
- •Graham founded Viaweb, sold to Yahoo, then started Y Combinator
- •Senra printed the essays and found no fluff, so the episode becomes two parts
- •Before July 2018 his uploads were intermittent
- •He decided that night to focus 100% on Founders, willing to spend his last savings
- 11:52 – 16:09
What Doesn't Seem Like Work
Graham's essay offers a heuristic: if something that looks like work to others doesn't feel like work to you, you're suited for it. Senra connects this to Michael Jordan and to his own love of reading.
- •Graham's father knew early he wanted to do maths
- •Programmers who like debugging illustrate tasks painful to some and pleasant to others
- •The stranger your tastes seem to others, the stronger the evidence for what you should do
- •Senra compares Michael Jordan's play-like work ethic and his own reading habit
- •Ask yourself what seems like work to others but not to you
- 16:09 – 24:00
How Not To Die: Survival and Demoralization
Graham's talk to Y Combinator startups says half may die and that survival is what matters. Senra links it to de Gaulle, Buffett and Thorp, and covers demoralization, avoiding distractions, and using fear of public failure.
- •Startups mostly die by crawling off, usually from demoralization
- •Excellence is the capacity to take pain, so expect it to feel terrible sometimes
- •The number one thing not to do is other things
- •Founders are more motivated by fear of looking bad than hope of millions
- •Bad things will happen, so don't give up
- 24:00 – 30:59
Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
Graham argues the economy matters little compared with the founders. Senra discusses investor behavior in downturns, Graham's view of the investor community, and the advice to run a startup as cheaply as possible, like a cockroach.
- •The economy is a rounding error compared to the founders
- •Look for threats to your company in the mirror, not the news
- •Investors are contrarian only in a minority, so they pull back in bad times
- •Run the startup as cheaply as possible so it's hard to kill
- •Less competition in bad times; founders are investors buying stock with work
- 30:59 – 32:51
Relentlessly Resourceful
Senra reads Graham's two-word description of a good founder, contrasted with 'hapless.' Being relentless alone isn't enough; difficulties are novel, so founders must keep trying new things.
- •Hapless means passive, battered by circumstances
- •A good running back is determined but adapts on the fly
- •Relentless is not enough because interesting problems are novel
- •Graham says this is the phrase he'd tape to the mirror
- 32:51 – 40:26
The Anatomy of Determination
Graham's essay says determination predicts startup success better than intelligence. Senra walks through willfulness balanced by discipline and aimed by ambition, and the value of surrounding ambitious people with peers.
- •Determination matters more than smarts; after a while it looks like talent
- •Determination is willfulness balanced with discipline
- •Dangers of indiscipline increase with temptation
- •Ambition is malleable and ambitious people bloom around ambitious peers
- •If you love the work, you don't need determination to drive you
- 40:26 – 49:33
What Startups Are Really Like: Co-founders and Total Immersion
Senra begins the essay built from founders' emails about what surprised them. He covers the first surprises: choosing co-founders on character, startups consuming your life, and the emotional rollercoaster.
- •Founders most often said to be careful with co-founders, prioritizing character and commitment over ability
- •The co-founder relationship is described as a marriage
- •Senra lists historical founder partnerships and acquisitions that rarely worked out
- •Startups take over your life, illustrated by Conor McGregor's total immersion
- •Highs and lows are extreme, but it can also be fun
- 49:33 – 55:38
What Startups Are Really Like: Persistence, Iteration and Customers
Continuing the list, the founders stress persistence over intelligence, long timelines, grinding on small things, shipping minimal products, and treating ideas as hypotheses. Competitors matter less than execution, and getting users is hard, which Senra ties to Steve Jobs on marketing.
- •Persistence alone dissolves obstacles and matters more than raw intelligence
- •Everything takes longer than expected, and success is a grind of little things
- •Start minimal, release fast and iterate; treat ideas as hypotheses
- •Don't worry about competitors; space is large
- •Getting users is hard and customer acquisition deserves focus
- 55:38 – 1:02:14
Deals, Investors, Luck and Community
The remaining surprises cover expecting deals to fall through, Graham's advice to raise little and stay small, clueless investors, feigning certitude, luck and community. Graham's 'super pattern' is that founders were told all of this and still don't get it until they do it.
- •Expect the worst with deals and assume you won't get more outside money
- •Graham says he'd raise about $500,000 and keep the company small if he were 22
- •Investors can be clueless; feigning certitude impressed them
- •Outcome is skill, determination and luck
- •The super pattern: people don't get how different it is until they do it
- 1:02:14 – 1:06:16
A Word to the Resourceful
Graham notes the least successful startups were hard to talk to, while the best could take care of themselves. The key is that understanding all the implications is a subset of resourcefulness, and weak founders show a conservatism from weakness.
- •Least successful founders felt like a wall between them and Graham
- •Best founders are fire and forget; give them a lead and they close it
- •A word to the wise is sufficient
- •Unsuccessful founders traverse idea space as gingerly as a very old person
- •Being hard to talk to signaled a lack of resourcefulness
- 1:06:16 – 1:13:41
Do Things That Don't Scale: Recruiting and Delighting Users
Graham argues startups take off because founders make them, by manually recruiting users, as with Stripe's Collison installation. Senra adds Estée Lauder's one-on-one makeovers and explains compounding growth and delighting early customers.
- •Startups take off because founders make them take off
- •Collison installation: set users up on the spot
- •Superior sales and distribution can create a monopoly, per Peter Thiel
- •Weekly growth of 10% compounds to millions of users in two years
- •Delight early users; small companies can do what big ones can't
- 1:13:41 – 1:23:54
Narrow Markets, Hands-On Tactics and Wrapping Up Part One
Graham's tactics include a deliberately narrow market like early Facebook, pulling a Meraki, and doing the customer's work as Viaweb did. He dismisses the big launch and says to think of startup ideas as a pair of what you build plus unscalable things; Senra then closes and teases part two.
- •Facebook started narrow with Harvard students
- •Meraki assembled routers itself, learning along the way
- •Viaweb built online stores for merchants and learned from the instant feedback
- •Big launches matter little; any strategy that omits effort is suspect
- •Think of an idea as a pair: what you build plus the unscalable things you do
