Black Swan Farming
Original excerpt
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. September 2012 I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas. The first rule I knew intellectually, but didn't really grasp till it happened to us. The total value of the companies we've funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it. In startups, the big winners are big…
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This article by Paul Graham is part of the Paul Graham reading list on Burn 451, covering startups & essays.
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