Saturday Thoughts

Money is not everything. It's really nothing at all. Providing value, doing something of interest, and helping somebody out. That is much more interesting. Money has very asymptotic returns, and once you have even a modicum to it, doing things that are mission critical are so much more worth while. This week has been particularly accretive to us. A number of larger partners have come knocking. It's been quite the turn, previously desperately clawing for a meeting with certain partnerss, to have them know how legitimate we are come backby themselves requesting commercial terms. It's quite a shift being in a leveraged position, so much nicer. I can imagine how sales execes at Nvidia or Anthropic must feel. HAHA sure the scale might not be 1:1 but nonetheless leverage is such a wonderful thing. Our first customer all those months ago paid us $300 for effectively 150 man hours between Saarth and I. Now we charge three orders of magnitude for maybe 1.5 OOM of man hours(?). The time estimate is hard, but clearly exponential, plus all of the other commitments. Delegation is key for a lot of things. Understanding what is important to retain individually as context, versus what to let go of. Definitely a very important and evolving skill. Earlier today, I was pondering why we hadn't hired anyone during YC, because we were extremely capacity constrained even then. And then I remembered, riiight we had no money 😅. (As an aside, is adding emojis cheating?) They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I worry that might have been too concise ;). Also, if there are mispellings here, please forgive me. I'm writing this in vim with no auto correct, at 2am in the morning. The maxim that some years nothing happens and some days decades happen, is so true. But it requires stacking those days, being comitted, even with it seems like nothing is happening, to have those compressed decades in a single day. There's a quote I like that goes: 'Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome.' See the outcome here has always been clear. We are not going to stop until we doat least $1bn in revenue. We are going to continue on, perservere, even when it looks impossible. We started this journey sleeping on floors, manually putting together datasets all night because we had customer deadlines. We've worked hundred hour weeks for months on end. Wept over lost customers we bled for. Worked tirelessly for some customers that never paid their commitments to us, who then repaid the favor by becomming big partners months down the line. And some who never repaid the favor (...yet). Now we have 14 people. People love our technology, and are astounded by our wares. We will keep going. A friend of mine is a pretty successful angel investor. When we first met, we both had the thesis that revenue mattered the most. That if you're a YC company and you're raising on demo day, the best way to evaluate that company was by how much tranction they had, and the quality of that traction. However, he was analyzing his investments, and he came to the recent update that resiliency as a characteristic mattered much more for performance than traction at Demo Day. His most successful investments all had tremendously resilient founders, that never quit no matter how hard the journey got. Quitting doesn't just mean giving up, it means not selling, it means continuing to build even when an important customer churns. It means to keep calm and carry on. Patience is rewarded so we will be patient.

Rodger Federer's speech at Dartmouth was phenomenal. He was the world's best at tennis, won of the winningest and yet he only won 80% of his matches. And of his matches he only won 55% of his points. He lost almost as much as he won, just a slight advantage. Arguably it is even easier in startups than this. Since we aren't playing a zero sum game, winning even 20% of shots on goal can be a multi billion dollar company. Even when we fail or mess up one route, this is a game that is undetermined, open-ended, and ripe for creativity. The objective is the same, deliver value for your customers and generate fees as a function of the value provided. See the worst failure case in the world is not losing, or failing, it is never trying. That's the only real failure in the world. To never really try and succeed. So long as we try hard, and attempt with all effort, guile, and wit we can muster to achieve our objectives, satisfy our customers than we have at least avoided the worst outcome. A friend of ours (Sarge Kennedy) once quoted his old colleague (David Duffield) to us, Dave had a saying which was 'On my tombstone they can write 'at least he had happy customers'." Please pardon my grammar, this is written as things were in antiquity, without spell check or large language models. I hope they can write the same on mine one day. 'At least we had happy customers'. (I really hope to never have a tombstone, but reality isn't perfect yet).

Erik has said something about lazy-vim. I do not really understand him, but it sounds interesting.

Let the people read. Been shackled for too long, pondering how this would be received, but these thoughts reflect my empirical observations. Real capital, like I mean the __serious__ pools of capital are all located in New York City. It is wow such a difference in lived experience seeing how much capital is here, and how they are managed. Almost all of my friends here are involved in various financial markets, or engaged in managing large pools of capital. It is shocking how much capital there is in the world, and how much of it is pooled within a single city. It's clear to me that there's a big delta in the technology available tothe provisioners of capital. Seeing how AR or various consulting companies manage their rolled up portfolio companies is incredible to me. The tecnology avilable to median startup is an OOM ahead of where some of these capital aggregators are operating. There's still so much diffusion left of the technology. It's going to happen though, the diffusion I mean, it's just a temporary block. I do actually think YC companies bringing AI to these siloed areas of the world is actually a huge unlock.

Updating on recent evidence, I have relatively high conviction that this calendar year we will do more than $10mm in revenue. I believe with relatively strong conviction we will do between $10mm and $100mm in revenue. My bounds of uncertainty will decrease throughout the year. But I remain relatively confident that as a lower bound, exceeding $10mm is quite reasonable. Recent developments have given me significant confidence in these statements. There is still much to do, butsometimes, if you've stuck to the basics, found the market that is willing to pay you, built your product for that market, well then revenue comes to you ;) I'm excited to keep you updated!

Sometimes I really cannot tell whether I underreact or over react. I have belief that my models of the world are good and accurate, but they are just models. Another issue is that the AIs of the world are all so steerable. They all so readily agree with whatever context or perception I have. Their syncophancy knows no bounds at the present hour. The CEO of some large tech company said that 'a core challenge of the AI industry over the next 20 years will be that of human survival.' I think invariably on this route, a cornerstone question is rigrously defending their subjective internal state. It's ironic, because there seems to me to be a clear path from 'rigrously protecting their internal state' to us all dying. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to deduce this path.

My name is Christopher Price. My thesis on writing my name, Christopher Price, is that if I write consistently enough, I will index higher on Google. Then, when I go to Google and type 'Christopher Price' in, I will be found. This is a weak thesis, but I am interested to see if it bears fruit. The best time to plant an oak tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today ;)

Look I know the world might be ending. But before it does, the integral of our revenue will exceed $1,000,000,000. That is my goal. I no longer desire to be strictly a billionaire as I once did in my youth. Instead, I'll now be satisfied by having helped build an enterprise that does over $1bn in revenue. That's enough for me now. When we started this company I thought to myself that 'Wow, if we work __really__ hard, I think we could make $60k". Now from a single deal we make that a month. And now quite rightfully, my (our) sights are set on the true endeavor. A machine that pumps out $1bn in revenue.

The world is ending...I think. People, pundits, researchers, and the like - keepmaking prognostications as if the world will continue normally. Believing for some reason that they will fare alright in the future to come. Always hidden in this prior is that humanity will be around. That they will be alive to see their 'hidden advantages'. The stock market briefly updated - but it is still 16 months behind the true state of the world.

This is a test!

If you've found something that is valuable, and you're building it, then it is inveitable that you will face competition. Other market participants will recgonize that what's being built really is useful, and they will want to compete. The more true this is, means (a) that it really is a needed service, and (b) there's a lot of value to being created here. Of course, we don't want competiton, nobody wants competiton, but competiton is inevitable if you're building something of value. So now the question becomes how to circumvent it, and remain relevant. How to build continuiously, sell continuiously such that we remain a growing and successful business. Frankly competition is nice, in some regards, because it means you're doing __something__ right. Unfrotunately, it also means there's a new hurdle to get over.

Today is not a Saturday, nonetheless I have the desire to post.