confoundcofound

Much of YC’s content and outreach is clearly targeted towards college students and younger generations. There is little to no acknowledgement of those who may have gotten into tech later in life with aspirations to eventually start a venture.

It’s incredibly deflating, particularly with every new YC company that comes out of stealth reaffirming the idea that it’s almost entirely a young person’s game.

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Have been reading a lot of PG’s and Sam Altman’s writings and following the YC classes, and I can’t help but feel as if they’d see someone at my age as not worth an investment, someone who didn’t necessarily have the right launchpad or resources or educational / professional prestige to set their career off on the right trajectory.

Throughout the startup world, there is very little in the way of advice for middle-aged / mid-career folks who are looking for a fresh start, or even successful examples of people doing so. If you’re not young or haven’t proven yourself in any notable way by a certain age, the message seems to be that you’re damaged goods.

Maybe I’m deluded. Perhaps 36 really is too old and that’s the harsh truth that no one has the heart to express?

Does anyone else feel this way?

Hi all –

For those who've worked with an ADHD coach and found it beneficial, I'd be grateful if you could provide recommendations on who you worked with.

Thanks.

Tech Twitter is ablaze with hype around a new crypto app that lets you monetize relationships. Much of the excitement by builders & VCs explicitly hand-waves away the obvious and self-admitted ponzinomics for the sake of social experimentation.

Watching this play out has peaked my long emerging disillusionment with Tech. When billions are poured into subsidizing the engineering of addiction under the guise of growth, when VR is being pushed as a way to unironically help us connect more immersively, when the crypto intelligentsia continues to wantonly deploy financial mechanisms that almost universally enrich insiders under the guise of economic liberation, and everyone seems obsessed with joining the club at all costs… how are you meant to remain hopeful for tech’s societal impact?

Or am I just overly moralizing this?

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I don't know if I'm overly sensitive and wholly unfit for the founder journey or have just had a distorted experience thus far, but increasingly it seems there is no "making it" it in this corner of venture without cutting ethical corners. Lying, backstabbing, amoral (read: inhumane) politicking, disregard for user well being and privacy, etc, all appear to be basic tools in every startup toolbox.

Call it delusion, but there is a small part of me that hopes to prove that startup success, however you define it, is possible through honesty, authenticity, and empathy. In an effort to do so, I'm in search of successful founders/CEOs who seem to exhibit these qualities.

As someone who's been in and out of the crypto space for years, recently it has felt increasingly as if this is a technology desperately in search of a UX solution that it may never achieve.

The industry is run by a cool kids club of crypto twitter thought leaders who seem to lack the experience and wisdom to realize that the threshold of UX required for mass adoption is currently wildly out of reach for the technology, no matter how pretty the UI is. Seed phrases, gas and fees, irreversibility of transactions, virtually no concept of customer support, etc etc.

Steve Jobs famously said "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it." The entire crypto space seems to be guilty of the latter.

The longer that this space continues to focus on and struggles to get traction for novelty toy products – eg art experiments – the more pessimistic I am about the long term viability of the underlying technology. I say this with friends who work in the space who after years of pontificating about the disruptive implications of crypto, are still tweeting about the latest NFT collectible.