Believe the no, but not the why.

less than 1m read

·Nov 3, 2024

There are a couple pieces of advice that we give to YC founders when talking to investors. I think the first is: believe the "no," but don't believe the "why." You're going to get a lot of "no"s when pitching, and more often than not, the investor will not be transparent as to why they're saying "no."

I think the second is that we say often is, you know, a good investor is respectful of your time, responds to your questions, makes a decision quickly, and leaves you alone. There are very, very, very many people who aren't that good, and there are very few people who add value.

So, if I were to kind of summarize our advice, it is really hard to tell whether you're interacting with a great investor or not. Oftentimes, as an early-stage YC founder or startup founder in general, you don't get to choose, right? Like, you don't have this wealth of choice.

I might say the first optimization is to try to go for people who regularly invest in startups and who are respectful of your time, respectful with you, and who move quickly.

Scaling Product | Fireside with Joe Gebbia and Reid Hoffman

Rational equations intro | Algebra 2 | Khan Academy

View All

Cost vs Quality in Edtech – Keith Schacht, Avichal Garg, and Geoff Ralston

A vitro you found it prep me in 2001, sold it ten years later in 2011. That was actually the year we found it. Imagine K12, the world’s first educational technology accelerator. And, Keith, you founded Mystery Science, I think in 2013. We just celebrated …

Subtracting a 1-digit number with regrouping | 2nd grade | Khan Academy

So we have the number 35, which is 3 tens, because we have a 3 in the tens place, so we have 3 tens, and we have a 5 in the ones place. So, this is the ones place, I’ll do the ones place in that same purple color. This is the ones place, and we see it rep…

Trade and tariffs | APⓇ Microeconomics | Khan Academy

In this video, we’re going to think about how trade affects the total economic surplus in a market, and we’re also going to think about tariffs, which are a per-unit charge that a government will often put on some type of good that is being imported. Usua…

Introduction to the Crusades

We are in the year 1095. Just for context, this is roughly half a century after the Great Schism between the Eastern Orthodox Church, centered in Constantinople, and what eventually gets known as the Roman Catholic Church, or the Latin Church, centered in…

Using matrices to transform the plane: Mapping a vector | Matrices | Precalculus | Khan Academy

Let’s say that we have the vector (3, 2). We know that we can express this as a weighted sum of the unit vectors in two dimensions, or we could view it as a linear combination. You could view this as (3) times the unit vector in the (x) direction, which i…

Revolutionizing the Way We Grow Food | Nat Geo Live

( intro music ) Caleb Harper: My talk is about how to solve the global food crisis. Technology and seed is for an adverse world. What if you had a perfect world? Researching this, for me, took me to a place of learning about Mir Space Station. You know, …

Believe the no, but not the why.

More Articles