My startup journey

John! Thanks for sharing your story. Anyone who ate as many Costco muffins as you, Doug, Max, Ted, and me during YC were destined for great things :) Congrats on the fundraise!

Hah what a similar story to my own - open source, Stripe then into YC. The energy at Stripe was unreal and I’m not sure I fully groked it until I started my own business.

> Everyone I talked to genuinely cared about their job and about me as a person, and everyone was high powered.

Simply walking around the office(s) was incredibly energizing for this reason. Fairly hard contrast with the last year of isolation and working alone! “Figure out what great looks like” is great advice, but I will say it does generate some imposter syndrome that I hadn’t felt before Stripe and YC, for (probably) better or for worse. Capitalizing on these experiences without getting caught up in comparison paralysis is a genuine skill that you seem to have mastered. Congratulations on the funding!

You captured the stochastic nature of building quite well - thanks for sharing : )

Author here: I started by making really small patches at the beginning and building up credibility with the team. For example, one of my earliest commits was just to add better verbiage on migrations (https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b4c99ea0a4d7e5223fa1b2...). Eventually the core team saw my name enough that my pull requests could get more complex.

I love the way you wrote the article with all those lessons at the beginning of every sub-chapter. Good luck further on.