Last week Congress passed House Bill 748, a $2 trillion relief package to individuals as well as small and large businesses. What’s particularly relevant to early stage companies is the Paycheck Protection Program, a low-interest, government-guaranteed loan covering 8 weeks of payroll and other expenses that turns into a grant…

When YC first introduced the SAFE agreement in 2013, few expected it to become the de facto instrument for early stage investing. But the document has become all but ubiquitous, with some unintended consequences. To address the expansion and the shortcomings, YC just unleashed a revised document dubbed post-money SAFE…

I am in my yoga class. The instructor introduces himself as a cis male. “Please correct me if I refer to you with the wrong gender pronoun,” he says. There’s a hint of apology in his voice — as if being a straight born male is an inferior form of…

2017 has been a whirlwind for the tech industry. It started with a public spat between Uber and Benchmark, followed by a string of sexual harassment revelations, and then the tulip-like rise of cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, some less dramatic but more lasting events took place: most notably, the methodical rise of…

There’s a scene in The Big Short (a must-see movie about the housing crisis) when Mark Baum and his staff realize that a local Miami mortgage broker has been conning strippers into taking out highly leveraged mortgages. We haven’t quite reached that level of shady with the Bitcoin bubble. But…

The modern day answer to startup woes does not work. — Ask an economist what the Greek financial crisis of 2010 and the fall of Rome in 476 AD have in common, and the answer is decadence: the luxurious self-indulgence that precedes a society’s decay. Startups today have reached a new level of decadence unseen in the first tech bubble. What…

One of the hardest advice for entrepreneurs is also counter to our popular narrative — It was summer of 1999. I was four weeks into my dream internship: a software development engineer at Microsoft porting games to the Dreamcast game console. Bill Gates, still CEO at the time, had invited all the interns for brunch at his house — a sprawling mansion on lake Washington…

Humility isn’t to think less of yourself but rather to think of yourself less — “We are killing it”, he said. I had asked what the company does as opposed to how well. “We are totally killing it.” He said again — eyes beaming with confidence. “My company is like Airbnb but better.” He proceeded to explain. They had grown 300% from the previous year…