Drug addiction = property crime.

What do San Francisco, Portland and Seattle all have in common? They are all three cities that are lax on drug addiction — public use, possession and intoxication. They are also three cities with the highest property crime rates in America.…

San Francisco’s historic pattern of economic recovery (basic lesson in supply and demand for hard leftists):

- Increased VC investment leads to new company formation (we are the innovation cradle of the world).

- Increased employment across all industries including blue collar…

Junior high Asian kids finding out that Harvard will once again require standardized tests for admissions

8 armed suspects ransacked the legacy Oakland Chinatown business Phuong Jewelry yesterday at around 12:30.

The family tells me, in less than one minute 85-90% of their inventory was taken.

Watch as owner Diane runs to the back & gets her 76-year old husband. He storms out…

Long term value of a company is inversely correlated to the frequency with which its leaders feel like they can't speak the truth.

Political executives who care more about how they look than the truth destroy value. Yet, business school churn out so many of these people.

Here's Y Combinator 's playbook for hard tech companies based on this awesome conversation (highly recommend watching)

Here's the TL;DR:
-Start Small to Demonstrate Feasibility and Gain Traction
-Secure Early Commercial Validation
-Focus on Solving a Significant Problem
-Think…

During YC I push Hard Tech companies to think like a software company. That means moving fast and not spending much money to prove you're making something people want. We talk about how this works surprisingly well in our latestLightcone episode:

youtu.be/erDE2e69dlc?si…

This is a very important thread, and something I deeply believe.

The internet is an abundance machine, but that abundance is increasingly going to large companies.

It's time for startups to stand up for the little guy.

Signs you are a career politician who is a liar

Community notes *chefs kiss*

Complete and utter defeat for the anti-test crusaders

Notion is, even by Silicon Valley standards, idiosyncratic. CEO Ivan Zhao picks out all the furniture at HQ and for years had a no-shoes policy.

My latest magazine profile looks at Ivan Zhao's big AI bet, which earned Notion a spot on #ForbesAI50 :

forbes.com/sites/kenrickc…

MORE ON SUBSCALE IPOs

New tldr: Don't go public unless you have a path to $1B high margin revenue in ~5 years.

Lots of discussion and feedback re: my earlier post on subscale IPOs. I went back and dug into the data. Important note: the ARR numbers below are not ARR at IPO,…

The VC backlog is clearing. IPO pipeline is filling (both upround and downround IPOs) and M&A is on 🔥 - both strategic deals at great valuations and distressed deals where VCs getting 50% to 100% of $$ back. The 2 year lag to the public market correction is here. 🙏🏼👊

So it may surprise some of you to learn that folks do raise venture capital after a rough patch all the time. In fact, it’s pretty common. VCs know the vast majority of startups have a tougher time or two.

But … but … VCs need some proof you are back to growth. They need…

Its funny how this plays out over and over again.
Big companies and competitors with unlimited money, large teams have a b2b product in the market for many years.
An early stage YC-startup with a 2 person team, builds a much better product in 2 months.

YC has a lot of software wins but some of the biggest mega Unicorns will be in hard tech. How did this happen? How can you go zero to one slinging atoms, not just bits? New on the Lightcone

youtu.be/erDE2e69dlc?si…

How do you start a startup that's building a supersonic jet?

Blake Scholl 🛫 did, and his company Boom Supersonic just did their first flight.

Here's a breakdown of 8 hard-tech companies with crazy ambitious ideas, and how they got started.

Big tech hurts small business. When companies like Amazon get so big, they can sell product for less, it helps the consumer short term, but hurts in the long term because it kills competition and makes it impossible to compete. Let's dig in and show how this happened. 🧵