flâneur

Ethan Benjamin

28 followers · 30 following · 886 views

on the atlas — 94

highlights — 155

  • A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing.
    Startup = Growth
  • I grew a lot the first time I was in SF. But I wonder if going back will undo all the progress I’ve made since. Will I be tempted by the sparkly titles and “founder house ragers” as I was once before or forsake it all, again?
    forsaking - by Jacky (: - Self-Love Rituals
  • Whether you start at 25 or 30 isn’t going to make much difference. It’s worth it to delay the compounding interest of a career by 5 or 7 years so you can make sure you have picked the right one.
    Make Big Money Mistakes Early - Nat Eliason's Newsletter
  • a single meeting will kill productivity for the entire morning or afternoon.
    The making of OpenAI - Greg Brockman
  • Most people never pick up the phone and call. And that is what separates the people who do things, versus the people who just dream about them. You have to act.
    Steve Job's Life Philosophy - by David Senra
  • In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.
    How To Be Successful
  • t’s also our best model for many non-chat use cases—we’ve seen early testers migrate from text-davinci-003 to gpt-3.5-turbo
    Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIs
  • But again and again I’ve realized that we make real connections by talking about anything else
    Pedestals prevent friendships. | Derek Sivers
  • A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are. People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential. Ask for what you want. You usually won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well. Almost always, the people who say “I am going to keep going until this works, an…
    How To Be Successful
  • One more thought about working hard: do it at the beginning of your career. Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier you do it, the more time you have for the benefits to pay off. It’s also easier to work hard when you have fewer other responsibilities, which is frequently but not always the case when you’re young.
    How To Be Successful
  • “I will fail many times, and I will be really right once” is the entrepreneurs’ way. You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky.
    How To Be Successful
  • And when one person climbs higher than the last person, we all feel like we are capable of being more.
    LeBron James Breaks the Scoring Record - James Quiambao
  • As a result, Hebbia has gone from 0 to 90% market penetration within top private equity firms in less than a year. They’re now rapidly expanding from that initial userbase.
    Why You Should Join Hebbia - by Eric Zhou and Usman Hanif
  • The short answer is that we built our own search engine from scratch, in Rust, specifically for the domain of code search.
    The technology behind GitHub’s new code search | The GitHub Blog
  • They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones. They're like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding "there's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything."
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • we advise founders of B2B startups to take over-engagement to an extreme, and to pick a single user and act as if they were consultants building something just for that one user. The initial user serves as the form for your mold; keep tweaking till you fit their needs perfectly, and you'll usually find you've made something other users want too.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made. And you in turn should be racking your brains to think of new ways to delight them.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?"
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • The big danger is that you'll dismiss your startup yourself.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • The mistake they make is to underestimate the power of compound growth
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • The more options I have, the more time I spend on evaluating them
    Four lessons I learned after my first full-time job after college
  • So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating.
    How Not to Die
  • Reading the Wall Street Journal for a week should give anyone ideas for two or three new startups. The articles are full of descriptions of problems that need to be solved. But most of the applicants don't seem to have looked far for ideas.
    Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
  • If 98% of the time you're doing product development on spec for some big company, why not think of that as your task? One advantage of this approach is that it gives you another source of ideas: look at big companies, think what they should be doing, and do it yourself.
    Ideas for Startups
  • To generate such questions you need two things: to be familiar with promising new technologies, and to have the right kind of friends. New technologies are the ingredients startup ideas are made of, and conversations with friends are the kitchen they're cooked in.
    Ideas for Startups
  • Treating a startup idea as a question changes what you're looking for. If an idea is a blueprint, it has to be right. But if it's a question, it can be wrong, so long as it's wrong in a way that leads to more ideas.
    Ideas for Startups
  • While young founders are at a disadvantage when coming up with made-up ideas, they're the best source of organic ones, because they're at the forefront of technology. They use the latest stuff.
    Organic Startup Ideas
  • those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than you.
    Organic Startup Ideas
  • “I remember calling my dad and he said, ‘You might not be smarter than them, but I do know one thing: You’re not going to blow this opportunity, and you will work harder than them,’ ”
    How To Get A First Job If You Aren’t LinkedIn
  • Days after arriving at Palantir’s Washington, D.C., office in May 2012, though, the 6-foot-1 Midwesterner had serious self-doubts. The 15 other interns seemed to hail from a different universe. They all attended brand-name schools and spent much of their time chatting about their high-end research projects
    How To Get A First Job If You Aren’t LinkedIn
  • expose yourself to as much rejection as possible.
    Remaining Ambitious - by Étienne Fortier-Dubois
  • half a year ago, I thought I could revolutionize some of the institutions of science, and now I am merely wondering if I’m good enough to land a regular coding job. Maybe I should go work in a restaurant or something. Am I even good enough for that?
    Remaining Ambitious - by Étienne Fortier-Dubois
  • Thus ambition is most vulnerable to a specific kind of failure, the one that matters socially: rejection.
    Remaining Ambitious - by Étienne Fortier-Dubois
  • You have to live with your decisions and thus, you should be the one making them.
    ambition as a fingerprint
  • If you want to improve your life, start with what you can control—the constant weaved into all of your experiences: yourself.
    self image - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • Sometimes all you need is relentless self belief and a specific aim to get what you want.
    self image - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • He only thought about and talked about those conditions within his control.
    self image - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • Those folks are never victims; they take what comes and handle the situation. The rest is a waste of time.”
    self image - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • If you are someone who focuses inward when the world becomes chaotic and volatile, you will win against almost anyone, and most importantly, against all other versions of yourself.
    self image - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do:
    How to Do What You Love
  • The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job. Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If you work too long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. And the best paying jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.
    How to Do What You Love
  • In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial.
    How to Do What You Love
  • Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy
    How to Do What You Love
  • To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool.
    How to Do What You Love
  • But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.
    How to Do What You Love
  • Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.
    How to Do What You Love
  • Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do.
    How to Do What You Love
  • gap year overview based on locations
    Structure of the Gap Year - Wendi Yan
  • They found that Hsieh’s obsession with happiness masked his darker struggles with addiction, mental health, and loneliness. In the last year of his life, he spiraled out of control, cycling out of rehab and into the waiting arms of friends who enabled his worst behavior, even as he bankrolled them from his billion-dollar fortune.
    Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh by Kirsten Grind | Goodreads
  • Being a dog, being unbreakable, always having that chip on your shoulder — hey, I get it. I’ve been that guy. But the day is going to come when you can’t do it on your own. And you gotta be strong enough on that day to ask for help
    I'm Still Here | By John Wall