Y Combinator Startup Podcast - Elon Musk & The Midwit Meme

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel on the midwit meme, how it applies to startups, and the best example: Elon Musk. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

This is the beauty of the midwit meme is the genius and an idiot come to the same conclusion. So what is the idiot approach? Like that's actually how you can divine the genius approach? It's just like, what would an idiot do? Everyone can reach for the idiot approach. Everyone is the intellectual capacity to reach for the idiot approach. If I didn't know anything. This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell.

Today we're going to talk about how overthinking is sometimes a founder's biggest mistake. So, Dalton, this video was triggered by this amazing meme that you made on fundraising advice. But before we get to the meme, because I think it's like one of the best memes I've ever seen for fundraising advice, let's start in general. Let's start in general. How can overthinking be bad? And when can overthinking be bad?

Yeah, I mean, I think that what people think, being a founder is, is what they saw in like watching the Facebook movie or or popular television where you know, you're like coding a lot and you know, you're making deals and screwing over your friends. Just kidding. But, but in reality, it's a lot of feeling lost and being not sure what to do and feeling stressed out a lot. And you're worried all the time. And so you tend to overthink everything. And every decision you kind of think. You kind of think. and circles over and over and over again because you don't have a boss, you don't have constraints when you're a startup founder, right? There's no one really telling you what to do, so you're on your own.

And so when you, the experience of being a startup founder, it's to always be overthinking everything. In this way, there's a bit of advantage to being young, right? Yeah, like you and I experienced this ourselves as founders where we were young when we first started. And this is the beauty of not knowing anything. The beauty of not knowing anything, the beauty of not knowing anything is that you think everything is easy. And none of the innumerable reasons why something might be hard or your startup might fail even occurs to you. You're like, oh, yeah, I'm 22. Like, everything's easy. I can figure this out. Right. And so again, this is like the midwit meme, right? Where if you don't know anything, your approach looks a lot like the approach of people that are

really good founders. And the worst place to be is that you know just enough to know why the things you're trying are hard and the odds are stacked against you, and that freaks you out. And so you think about it a lot, right? So Dalton, one of the most perfect examples of this is actually Elon Musk. And why I think it's so perfect is that depending on how you tell the story, Elon looks like the dummy or the idiot, right? Like, I'm sorry, the dummy or the genius, right? Depending on how you tell the story. And it almost doesn't matter, right, because he's winning. But, you know, to me, the first he's example that I always loved is that, you know, I read some book about the starting of SpaceX, and it started with Elon going to Russia trying to buy like rockets. And like the Russian government

being like, there's this American billionaire guy who wants to buy rockets and kind of not believing it, but Elon just looking really serious. So they like considered it. And like they eventually said no, but like he got to talk to people about buying rockets from that. He's just a Dude with money. He was like, go to Russia, buy rockets. Like, those are the extremes. Is that genius or stupid? I can't tell.

I can't tell. And like with Tesla itself, like, to me, the midwit is electric cars are good. That's the extreme. Electric cars is good. Or in the middle, it's like, no one has successfully done a startup car company since the 50s. And every, you know, if you look at all prior attempts to build an electric car, like there's all these words. And the infrastructure you need is good. Yeah.

Yes. And I think the one that we find most funny, which we'll see, this video will see if we send the test of time is the boring company, right? Drilling holes under the ground so that you can drive places faster is very clearly the idiot one, but like it could be the genius one too. Yeah, it's exact. It's a beginner's mind idea, which is like traffic is bad. What if we dug a hole under the ground to get to downtown Las Vegas?

And what's funny is you read all the critiques of this, like the Midwest stuff's like, wow, bus systems already exist. It's much more efficient to optimize transportation. You know, there's lots of words in the middle of that. But, you know, drill tunnel to avoid traffic is certainly at the extremes. Yeah. And you kind of see him approach all of his problems this way where you can imagine it being the same sort of ideas that we, like, Mars is cool.

Like, yeah, Mars is cool. Like this is kind of stuff. we come up with his teenagers, like a lot of his ideas. Yes. And the, the hard work is in the implementation, but the idea isn't very complicated. And like the V1 is kind of simple-minded. And if he was an overthinker, he would do, he would rule all the stuff out. All this stuff is like obviously a bad idea. And anyone in the Midway territory would rule out all these ideas. Yes. Right. Yes. Yes. And they still do. They still do. It's, you know, it's the Tesla short.

Sorts seller, right? Let's go through some examples of the midwit meme. And you have to start with the meme that you made for YC founders. So just to provide context, we're in the part of the batch where YC founders start getting nervous about fundraising. And whenever a founder gets nervous, they start overthinking. And whenever they start overthinking, they assault us with office hours on topics. And Dalton created this meme so that we could fight back. What does the meme say?

Yeah, the meme is simple. It's the naive founder is like, oh, I'm going to raise the amount of money I need to succeed. I need to, here's the amount of money I need to raise for my Series A. I ran a model and it's, you know, $800,000, so that's what I'm going to raise. That is the like naive approach. The really smart three-time founder, someone that's done this before, is like, I need to raise $800,000. So I'm going to do it. And then the midwit is the one who wants to ask 15 questions and try to construct the perfect round

and be afraid that they may not have enough allocation for value add investors and they want to not have a signaling risk. They talk a lot about signaling risk. And there's like all these factors where I'll be talking to someone and it will be like 15 levels deep and a hypothetical for an offer that they don't have. Right? And that's that's the midwit. it, man, is that like you're screwing yourself by overthinking all this stuff. Instead of just being

like, hey, I need X dollars, I'm going to raise it and I'm going to get back to work. This comes up a lot with MVPs. One of the questions that I love getting from a founder is before we launched our MVP, how do we know we're going to be able to survive the onslaught of traffic and users that will come on our launch day? What's midwit? What's the midwit play? What's the midwit? What's the midwit? meme for your MVP? I mean, yeah, the two extremes of the midwit meme are launch something fast. Build something fast and put it out. And the midwit one is like, well, I don't want to get a bad reputation that my thing was buggy.

And we only have one shot to launch. And you know, like you come up with... What about the press? We got to do a press launch. It doesn't have to be an event. Yeah. I don't want people to see my idea and copy. So it's got to be perfect.

Yes. That's one. And then do we do like a tech crunch post or is it better to try to get the New York Times or like what about Hacker News? Yeah. We need to get all three. So how do we coordinate them together? We want to be featured in the New York Times. And so how do we optimize for that?

Or, oh, what should we name the company? How about I don't. Yes. We have to rebrand because there's a name that's kind of similar to ours. We don't want people to be confused. How about co-founders? I hear this a lot. Like, I, I am a business person and I'm good at sales.

I need to find a marketing co-founder and an engineer, like a CTO who's already managed 50 people because we're going to grow fast. Like, how does co-founders, how do you see this thing go? Yeah, Dalton, I'm open to the idea of a co-founder. I just haven't found the right person. And what I really am looking for is someone with at least five to seven years of experience. at Google who made it to at least a level seven. And so, you know, I'm looking, I haven't found the right person yet, but we're looking for it. Yes. When we find them, I'm totally open to bring out a co-founder when I find that one. But first, we're going to raise money and then I think

that I'll attract a better co-founder. Yeah. Yes. So again, the point we're kind of making is not that any one of these ideas is the one people say. It's that it's thinking in circles and having a thousand different reasons. Yes. That it's, that the person that should be your co-founder is no one

that you currently know. Yes. Yes. Right. And then, and let's talk about the other sides of the equation, right? The,

the, on the dumb side, the founder's like, it's fun to work with my friends, so I'm just going to start my friend. On the smart side, Justin Kahn likes to put a camera

on his head. Yeah, let's go. This is our guy. We were drinking buddies. Why didn't they pick you? Is their co-founder? Wasn't it like?

Well, I helped them find an apartment and open a bank account. This guy helped us find an apartment. All right. He's the co-founder of Twitch. Done. There you go. Done.

And then like the super smart experience founders like, oh, having co-founder is valuable for emotional support. I know this is going to be tricky. And like they have all the like sophisticated reasons. Same answer. Same answer. I love that. Okay.

Next, this is a classic one, especially because you have to do with so many admissions questions. Applying to Y.C. Dalton. What is the Jedi founder move to apply to YC versus the midwit founder? Yeah, the extremes of this in the midwit meme are, I filled out my application and submitted it. Like, I applied. And the midwit founder is like, gee, I don't know if now is the right time to apply.

I don't know if we're ready. Oh, I'm going to write a draft of my application and to send it to 15 people. and I'm going to get feedback on my application and I'm going to like you know, oh, I need an introduction to alumni and I need to talk to alumni and I need recommendations. Yeah, I need recommendations from strangers

that don't know me. I'm going to do a lot of research. Like you talk to people that like put months of effort into their application to YC strategy. Yes. Not correlated with success. And then you talk to people and they're like, oh yeah, I just like filled it out in 30 minutes and got in.

Yeah. And I spent all that other time working on my company. And to be clear, we're not saying do a bad job on your application. We're just saying trying to tweak out on this is like something that you can spend tons and tons and tons of time on. I'm not sure that's a great allocation of resources. No. And I think that's like maybe the essential point here. is that like, we want you to spend time on the important stuff for your startup.

Like, we're trying to get you to avoid spending time on the things that won't help you. That's the idea. That's the idea. All right. Next, and here's kind of a classic one, is product market fit. Dalton, do I have product market fit? And what's the midwit approach to? Yeah, the midwit approach for this one is,

to be not sure if you have it and create 15 different metrics and like a complicated series of thoughts that maybe you have it or you have early product market fit versus the extremes on this meme early product product we have sorry it's got early yeah the extremes of this are like am I overwhelmed with demand but you know it when you see it like you don't have to think very hard when you have it it's sort of like hits you over the head when you have product market fit don't think the streams in the meme is like, did I sleep last night? It's like, I didn't sleep last night. Do I have time to wonder if I have product market fit? That's yes, yes. If you have time to wonder about it, if you're like, gee, do I have product market fit? Let me, let's pontificate on this. That probably means you know. Yes. Let's do some, let's make some reports. So, so we talk about all the situations where maybe overthinking is not a good idea. But you also describe, you know, there are certain situations. You call them trapdoor decisions when maybe you want to think a little bit harder than

before making a move. So what are some examples of those? Yeah. So legal issues. Don't break any law. Like saying you didn't know there was a law is not a great legal defense. Regulatory issues similarly. Oh, I didn't know that I couldn't launder this money.

probably not great. You may want to overthink that and look into it. Things that affect people's health and well-being. Yeah, you should overthink that. You should really spend the time worrying about people, right, man? Let's not be fast and loose if we're building an online pharmacy. Let's measure twice, cut once. And I think that what really good founders do is they are very good at figuring out,

Are they dealing with something like that or are they not? Because even within legal, right? There are certain things that are like, oh, this is like whatever. And there's certain things that are like really bad. Michael, should I file patents for all of my IP? Exactly. Absolutely. It's a classic overthinking.

Absolutely not. Probably not. So I think that like the framework here is really twofold. One, don't overthink when you don't have to. and then two, remember that like most of the work, most of the work is not in these overthinking games. Like most of the work are not in these over-optimizing games. Yeah. It's action.

Yeah. Taking action and not thinking, right? Yes, yes. It's launching. It's getting the first customer. It's selling. It's like it's doing these things yourself. And that's kind of intuitive because I think that founders understand.

that startups are really hard, so they assume you need complex strategies to succeed. And it's like, oh, that's a hard thing. It makes sense when I say it, right? This is hard. We would need a complex strategy, right? How do you respond to that? It's like, what actual kind of strategy do you need? I think if you haven't seen really successful startup companies either personally,

like where you were the founder of one, or you know people and you saw them go through it, Yeah. It's hard to believe how silly these things are when they start. Like, I think unless you've literally witnessed it personally and you've seen the silly shit that goes on and like how what it really takes to get big, your brain rejects the idea. Yeah. That's actually how these companies got built. You're like, no, not true. It had to be like lots of strategy meetings and whiteboarding, you know, flow charts and, you know, you know,

Gartner magic quadrants of like like like I think you really your brain won't allow you to see that actually here's a nice way to say it is you know the term beginner's mind you want to have a beginner's mind yes that's what the midway meme is and a beginner's mind is like I guess I'm gonna build a product and I'm gonna give it to people I guess I'm gonna deliver burritos you know that's that's a beginner's mind approach yeah That's the game. And so you might find yourself after watching this video asking yourself, what do I need to unlearn? Yeah. How can I have a beginner's mind? Because again, this is the beauty of the midwit meme is the genius and an idiot come to the same conclusion. So what is the idiot

approach? Like that's actually how you can divine the genius approach? Is you're like, what would an idiot do? Everyone can reach for the idiot approach. Everyone is the intellectual capacity to reach for the end. Yeah, if I didn't know anything. So with all that being said, have fun, and don't overthink it too much. Don't overthink it too much. And make sure that you have a little bit of something in your head that's asking yourself, is this the thing that's really important?

If not, I can move on. If not, I can move on. All right. Thanks much, Alton. Thanks.