Low Status, High Status

The Legendary First Batch at YC in 2005
Company Founder(s) Recent Graduate Current Student 4+ Years Outside College Notes
Reddit Steve Huffman Yes No No Graduated from the University of Virginia in 2005
Reddit Alexis Ohanian Yes No No Graduated from the University of Virginia in 2005
Reddit Chris Slowe No No Yes Research assistant at Harvard for 6 years since his graduation in 2000 from Harvard
Infogami Aaron Swartz No Yes (Dropped out) No Was working on projects and activism prior to YC, dropped out of formal education
Kiko Emmett Shear Yes No No Graduated from Yale in 2005
Kiko Justin Kan Yes No No Graduated from Yale in 2005
Loopt Sam Altman No Yes No Was a sophomore at Stanford University
Loopt Nick Sivo No Yes No Also a sophomore at Stanford University
Memamp Zak Stone Yes No No Graduated from Harvard one year before joining YC
TextPayMe Philip Yuen No No Yes Graduated from Cornell in 2000, Masters from 2001 to 2002, worked for Microsoft 2002-2005
Clickfacts Mikhail Ledvich No Yes No Was a current student at the time of joining YC
Simmery Axe Jesse Tov Yes No No Graduated from Harvard in 2003

Why This Batch is Legendary

One of the reasons why this batch is so legendary is because the kind of people who would work on an idea for a summer, when it was not popular to do so, are the kind of people who end up being successful.

Another data point is that, when the internet just began, it was low status to go work for Google, Microsoft, or some other internet company compared to banking. The people who took the low-status option then, are rich af now.

Now, starting a startup is no longer regarded as low status and is even regarded as elite. This means that starting a startup no longer attracts only the specific type of people who are willing to do some low-status thing because of their conviction or interestingness. It also attracts people who are looking to attain higher social status.

Former YC president, Sam Altman, talked about how he feels some responsibility now that starting a startup is no longer the way it was when he started - ‘the motivation for starting a startup has changed and is now equivalent to going into banking.’ [link]

The Importance of Being Low-Status

Well, what’s the point? What is it with people who are willing to be low-status? Why is that important at all?

The first is a simple business law - taking advantage of undervalued ideas. If you believe in and act on an idea that most of the world has not yet accepted, and are right, you will profit from it. For example, ‘one day, everyone in the world will be using computers’. This idea gave birth to Apple and Microsoft. When ideas are not mainstream yet, people who don't mind being low-status are much more likely to believe in and take advantage of them. You have to be willing to give up your status and be bold enough to do it. If you cared so much about what other people think, you’d believe what most other people believe in or act like you believed what they believe. In other words, you have to be okay with people calling you foolish and laughing at your ideas. Here’s Bill Gates talking about the internet in 1995 [link].

There are many other reasons to pursue an idea. You might enjoy working on it, have a deep conviction, or want to solve a specific problem. The point is that the best people wouldn’t be deterred from pursuing an idea because it was low status. Unsurprisingly, the best ideas usually are. Regardless of the motivation, achieving high status in the future involves believing in low-status ideas now, acting on them, and being right.

“If you’re going to do anything new or innovative, you have to be willing to be misunderstood.”
~ Jeff Bezos

So, What Low-Status Thing Should I Be Doing Now?

What is Love?

It's butterflies in your belly, but slightly heavier,

A silent flutter, a gentle throb, a sense so peculiar.

If love were a number, it'd be an odd one,


Why?

Divided, it's never clean, there's always something left, a reminder here.

Like an echo that lingers, a ghost unseen,

A part of you left in spaces you've been.



Why do we squeeze it into one word - "love"?

When it's a myriad, a myriad of complex emotions, the opposite of cold.

Isn't it giving myself to you, sharing my soul,

But when you left, I felt strangely whole.


Why call it a "break-up" then, if I'm still intact?

Am I too cold, or is it love that I lack?

If love was a color, it wouldn't be red,

Too visible, too blatant, too quickly read.


Neither would it be blue, cool as a breeze,

Love is a flame, not meant to freeze.

Yellow, too simple, green, too wide,

A color to match love's turbulent tide?


Orange, perhaps, a blend of two extremes,

A concoction of passion, and tranquil dreams.

A fusion of hues in a world gone grey,

Isn't that what love's like, at end of day?


I may not know love, as some do claim,

Yet in its mystery, I find no shame.

But why box love in numbers or colors,

When it's free, bright, and wild, unlike any other?


So here's to love, odd and orange -  undefinable,

An emotion so vast, so unconfined - undeniable.

A force that surprises, disrupts and reforms - unexplainable

In the end, there is only one word that can explain love - Love.


Resemblance

You know,

We imagine what our perfect world would look like

That dream in fantasy land 

Then we remind ourselves that it is not just fantasy and there’s a chance it becomes real


In real life, we find something 

Not quite what we dreamt of

But a good semblance of it 

So we hold it with our dear lives 

Because it is the closest thing we’ve seen to our dreams

And scared that this is the closest we will ever get


Or because we hope it becomes what we dream of

So we fight for it. 


Or maybe, we should just let it all go and hope our dream manifests perfectly in real life.


Young Nigerian Founders

YCombinator is “a "functional" (a function that operates on other functions) that enables recursion, when you can't refer to the function from within itself. [1]” I don’t understand what that means either. So, in other words, YCombinator “allows you to implement recursion in a language that doesn't necessarily support it natively. [2]” In even simpler terms, it is a hack.

YCombinator allows something that is not otherwise possible to become possible. YCombinator - the organization that you may have heard of, was created for this sole purpose. To allow people who would not have started a startup otherwise start one. Startups solve problems. Solving problems is good for the world. More startups mean more good for the world. This was the thinking of the founders of YCombinator when they started, because they believed it was a net good for the world. They also knew that it was hard for startups to get funding from VCs - You had to have a significant amount of traction to get any money. YCombinator was willing to fund you much earlier, even if you had only an idea. YCombinator also didn’t care as much about the idea as they did the person. They were, and still are taking bets on people and not the ideas. Afterall, it’s people that get ideas. Now, YCombinator seems prescient. The first accelerator in such a unique time in Silicon Valley history.

I believe Nigeria is in a unique situation [3] where a YCombinator is going to be very useful - An organization to make it easier for people to start companies, especially young unproven people like myself. I really believe young people like me can build startups that have significant impact on Nigeria, on the continent and on the world. History is on my side - Zuckerberg, Gates, The Collison brothers, Opeyemi, Altman, Musk the list is super long. For some reason this kind of organization does not exist in Nigeria - An accelerator for students and young people to work full-time on an idea and a small amount of capital to get them started.

I would like to start something like this that funded students to work on their ideas full-time in the summer instead of working an internship or doing nothing. Whether the idea they plan on working on is good or if the project ends up failing does not matter as much as fueling ambitious young people to take a leap. In fact, in YCombinator’s legendary first batch, three or four teams out of the eight had pretty humble outcomes, but the founders went on to build multibillion-dollar companies. So, the goal is to help ambitious founders take the leap. And when you do that, you get great outcomes anyway.

The goal quite plainly is to build something like Early YCombinator. To learn more about what YCombinator is, why and how it got started, read these essays from YCombinator’s founders - Why YC, The Puzzle around you.

Thanks to Joel Adejola and Yvonne for reading drafts of this.

[1] - source 
[2] - source 
[3] - what makes Nigeria's situation unique? Does She have the 'capable people' or the market/opportunity or both? - (1) There are funds but not available to very very early startups. (2) In every market there are always opportunities to be solved, so the big question is 'who will?' (3) Does it have 'capable people'? is a much harder question. A simplistic view of this is that there's an equal distribution of talent. So, yes. But another question is, is there really an equal distribution of talent geographically? Idk. But is there talent in Nigeria? Yes, there is - I have seen it with my own two eyes.

I want to work on my own thing in the summer. How?


I have some ideas I am currently working on and would be great if I could continue working on them through the summer instead of going for an internship. There is so much alpha in working on your idea like a full-time job. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find any programs that would allow me to do this. The closest to this is Zfellows. While it is a great option, it is not built entirely around summers - still applying tho. 

Honestly, I am shocked that this kind of program does not already exist in the US, especially as one of Silicon Valley’s most prescient companies started like this - YCombinator. I’ve seen some programs like this but specifically for students of a particular University, and my University does not offer this kind of program. 

 If you know any programs like this, please share in the comments or shoot me a message.