Find Your People

She co-founded it, didn’t she? Created it to operationalize her ideas, which, from the sound of her speech, confused people around her at the time? Or am I misunderstanding what you’re asking?

> When we started Y Combinator, everyone treated it as a joke. We were funding kids right out of college and only giving them small amounts of money. How could these startups ever succeed? Now everyone knows it's a good idea to fund young founders, but twenty years ago, it just seemed lame. But we didn't care what people thought of us. We knew we were onto something. In fact it was good that we seemed lame, because that meant it took several years before people started to copy us.

I've tried a couple times, but the interest in making physical things cycles through just like any other interest. Then it gets replaced by something like neurobiology or anthropology and I don't want to make things for awhile.

It seems like I really enjoy the beginnings of things, like if we run Pareto ratios twice, I like the 4% of the learning that gets me 64% of the understanding. And then it's enough and I'm done. It's enough to ask questions of the interesting people without sounding like a total n00b.

In the time it would take to master one thing, I become "barely proficient" in 25, but it's hard to build anything meaningful, including human connections, operating like that.

I know healing isn't a requirement to deserve the friendship of others. But if I keep operating like this because of it, it's definitely an impediment to building those friendships.

Interesting, too, how many institutions are very willing to jump in and put you back on an endless subway train. e.g. graduate school, postdoc, junior faculty, assistant professor, full professor...the ride never ends!

I think its important to think about this point in the context that Jessica attended one of the most elite private schools in the US, Phillips Academy, with an annual tuition that is currently ~60kUSD/year. Notable alumni include both Bush presidents, and many billionaires or their children. Afterwards she attended Bucknell University, another private elite institution, tuition ~65kUSD/year, where the median family income is > 200kUSD/year, and 73% of the student body is from the top 20% income bracket.

So its important to "find your people", but as always it's as important to situate advice in the context where the advice-giver issues it from, and in this case Jessica has spent her entire life as an elite, finding other elites in elite circles, and I'm going to hazard a guess that this is probably something that has had a positive impact on her life.

I think your friends are probably on to something, realizing that you're responsible for helping to guide your child as they grow up has a way of crystalizing certain arguments, and various "hypotheticals" fall by the wayside as the attraction of an intellectual experiment and being the devil's advocate just doesn't really have the same pull anymore once it's your own child's future at stake and not just some thought experiment about "volumes and contrasts". As always people are free to make their own choices, and even listen to a speech from someone who was able have almost $200,000 of money spent on their high-school education, a speech about how to plan your career that is big on "gumption" and "stick to it" energy, and surprisingly short on "be born in the top 1% of economic circles", but given that this is a speech at the aforementioned Bucknell, I am pretty sure that most of the crowd is already pretty hip to the realities of the world they're about to enter.

Final sentence:

> Find the interesting people.

Note that this isn't advice for everyone. Go back to earlier in the piece:

> But in the middle, there's a group who wish they had ambitious plans, but don't. This speech is for you. I'm going to tell you how to get ambitious plans.

The "Find Your People" of the title is the more general advice, for a larger audience.

Your people might well be a quiet small town environment that's doing OK economically, has good school(s) for children, people are neighborly and supportive, not a lot of inequity and all that follows, etc.

You might not think of that as interesting, at least not in the abstract, but it might be your people.

For myself, who seems to be a natural startup person (maybe including a little bit of both Swartz and Altman), I've been thinking that I'm most likely to find a concentration of my people in a town with a good liberal arts college, intermixed with economically OK non-college people, and easily accessible to a major metro area -- without feeling cut off too much from activity and opportunity, and with having a regular infusion of a little freshness/change.

(I'm not convinced that Cambridge/Boston, San Francisco, or NYC can be that place, long-term, unless you have enough money to insulate yourself from the VHCOLA downsides. And then maybe you end up mostly only associating with people who also have enough money to be sufficiently insulated, which isn't the complete breakfast.)