<Markets>

Over the next couple of months, we’ll be talking about some of our plans and the partners we are working with to make this a reality....

Helion has been progressing even faster than I expected and is on pace in 2024 to 1) demonstrate Q > 1 fusion and 2) resolve all questions needed to design a mass-producible fusion generator....

Today we did a research launch of DALL•E 2, a new AI tool that can create and edit images from natural language instructions. Most importantly, we hope people love the tool and find it useful. For me, it’s the most delightful thing to play with we’ve created so far....

I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion. Helion is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve seen. David and Chris are two of the most impressive founders and builders (in the sense of building fusion machines, in addition to building companies!...

Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal....

There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor....

I am pretty sure cryptocurrency is here to stay in some form (at least as a store of value, which is the only use case we have seen work at scale so far). There was possibly a time when governments could have totally stopped it, but it feels like that’s in the rearview mirror....

I’d like feedback on the following idea. I think that every adult US citizen should get an annual share of the US GDP. I believe that owning something like a share in America would align all of us in making the country as successful as possible—the better the...

I'm a strong believer in the importance of the internet in helping people to share knowledge and learn from each other. So I’m delighted to share, on behalf of YC Continuity, that we’re investing alongside Collaborative Fund in Quora. Quora is doing extremely well....

I am endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. I've never endorsed a presidential candidate before, but I'm making an exception this year, because this election is exceptional....

I'm going to say something very unpopular in my world: Trump is right about some big things. He's right that many Americans are getting screwed by the system. He’s right that the economy is not growing nearly fast enough....

A lot of people have been saying we’re in a tech bubble for quite some time. Someday they’ll be right, but in the meantime, I thought it'd be fun to look back at some articles from the last 10 years: 2007, Coding Horror -- Welcome to Dot-Com Bubble 2.0....

I’m delighted to finally be investing in Asana, which I’ve wanted to do for a long time. One of the things I’ve learned about companies is that 1) clear tasks and goals, 2) clearly communicated, and 3) with clear and frequent measurement are very important to success....

Maybe instead of a tech bubble, we’re in a tech bust. No one seems to fervently believe tech valuations are cheap, so it’d be somewhat surprising if we were in a bubble. In many parts of the market, valuations seem too cheap....

Airbnb has recently been attacked by San Francisco politicians for driving up the price of housing in the city. San Francisco has tried, and will continue to try, to ban Airbnb in various ways. Last week, this excellent post was published on Prop F—“the Airbnb law”....

I think a lot about how important cheap, safe, and abundant energy is to our future. A lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water availability, bad side effects of globalization, etc.—are deeply related to the energy problem....

I’m tired of reading about investors and journalists claiming there’s a bubble in tech. I understand that it’s fun to do and easy press, but it’s boring reading....

This is a very short summary with lots left out—here is the long version: http://startupclass.samaltman.com You should start with an idea, not a company....

The most important story of 2014 that most people ignored was the Chinese economy overtaking the US economy. (This is using the purchasing power parity metric, which incorporates differences in the price of goods, but the Chinese economy will overtake on other...

I recently got to be a guest at a FarmLogs board meeting. I was struck by how much of an impact the company was having on the world, and how just a couple of years ago it seemed like they were doing something so small....

I get asked fairly often now by people in the US government what policy changes I would make to “fix innovation and drive economic growth” [1][2] (for some reason, it’s almost always that exact phrase)....

I wrote this for the FT, but it's behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it's probably ok for me to post it here. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate....

I’m very excited to share that I’m investing in reddit (personally, not via Y Combinator). I have been a daily reddit user for 9 years—longer than pretty much any other service I still use besides Facebook, Google, and Amazon—and reddit's founders (Steve Huffm...

An article came out today in Businessweek about arrogance and Silicon Valley. I thought it was good, but there was one more point I wanted to make. People often accuse people in Silicon Valley of working on things that don’t matter. Often they’re right....

I started seed investing in 2010 (and much more actively in 2012) before becoming a full-time YC partner. In this period, I invested in about 40 companies....

When there is a structural reason consumers don’t have freedom of choice, and the free market can’t work, consumers need minimal protection from the government so that they don’t get abused. We need protection from the cable companies to keep the Internet fair and open....

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago in which I said macroeconomic collapse “may happen” and a few friends asked me why. To be clear, I don’t think it’s the likely outcome—I think we’ll find a way to address our challenges. But here is what some of the challenges are....

People have been saying that startup valuations are really high for about 3 years now. I myself feel that they are high, but I have no idea when they are likely to change. It’s mostly investors that talk about valuations being way too high....

The price of bitcoin keeps trending down. [1] This causes a lot of people to declare the end of bitcoin. It’s important to understand that the default price pressure of the bitcoin ecosystem is down. There are a lot of reasons for this, so I’ll just give a few examples....

Startup employees often do not get treated very well when it comes to stock compensation. New ideas float around occasionally, but lawyers are usually averse to trying new things, and investors don’t feel that they have enough incentive to try something new for employees....

Nearly 5 years ago, Paul Graham first proposed the founder visa. There has been a lot of discussion since, but nothing has happened. Maybe he was too ambitious in asking for 10,000 startup visas per year....

There’s a lot written about what you should do when you raise money, but there hasn’t been as much written about the common mistakes founders make....

Thanks to technology, people can create more wealth now than ever before, and in twenty years they’ll be able to create more wealth than they can today. Even though this leads to more total wealth, it skews it toward fewer people....

Maybe bitcoin will be the world reserve currency, maybe it will totally fail, or maybe it will survive in some niche capacity....

One of the most interesting changes in venture capital going on right now is the separation of advice and money. For a very long time, these have been a package deal....

Maybe now we’re actually in the early stages of a startup bubble. Valuations are trending up again. And no one is talking about a bubble anymore, so it could be happening. Many companies still feel reasonably priced....

There’s a lot of debate about whether or not the pace of innovation has slowed, and if so, what that means. After some particularly brutal pitches that felt like Saturday Night Live parodies of startups, I feel compelled to weigh in....

Startups talk a lot about optimization—A/B testing, product enhancements, conversion funnels, email campaigns, etc. These sorts of things can often produce 10% gains, and much more if you can compound several together. This is great, but only if the business is already working....

There is a recent trend in Silicon Valley towards party rounds—in early financing rounds, instead of raising large amounts of money from a few large investors, companies are instead raising small amounts of money from many small investors....

When I invest (outside of YC) I make offers with the following term sheet. I’ve tried to make the terms reflect what I wanted when I was a founder. A few people have asked me if I’d share it, so here it is. I think it’s pretty founder-friendly....

In honor of the new YC batch starting tomorrow, here is some of the best startup advice I’ve heard or given (mostly heard): 1. Make something people want. 2. A great team and a great market are both critically important—you have to have both....

Everyone claims that they understand the power law in angel investing, but very few people practice it. I think this is because it’s hard to conceptualize the difference between a 3x and a 300x (or 3000x) return....

TL;DR Without economic growth, democracy doesn’t work because voters occupy a zero-sum system. The first piece of startup wisdom I heard was “increasing your sales will fix all problems”....