Don't make the investor your customer.

These conformists are also now invading the startup world, and I agree with you. Right? The highest status job in the early-stage startup world is investor. Right? It's the one everyone wants to meet, everyone's talked to, everyone seeks approval from, and so for sure, it makes sense. Right? The logic follows.

But we also see a lot of these folks who are conformists and want to do startups. It feels like their motivation or starting point is very different than what we would expect. You know, one of the things that we say sometimes at YC is that you shouldn't make the investor your customer.

But a lot of these conformists who are getting into startups, that's what they do. They want an idea that an investor is going to like. They want to act the way that an investor is going to like. They want to have their resume that an investor is going to like. And their questions are usually something along the lines of wanting us to tell them the secret to get investors to like them. They hope that we will tell them the secret words to whisper to an investor to get approval.