Yuri Sagalov @yuris Twitter profile

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Yuri Sagalov

4 months

OKAY. I think it's time to make it official. 📣 Introducing Wayfinder II — a $35M seed-stage fund investing $300k-$1M checks in founders building enduring companies solving tomorrow's hard problems.

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Last Seen Profiles

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@SkillSetPod

@1T_HurtsSoGood

Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

5 years

Man goes biking, flips his bike, hits his head, gets knocked out and doesn't regain consciousness until sometime during the ambulance ride. Apple Watch detects the fall, autodials 911 with his location and EMS has him picked up and in the hospital in <30 minutes. Incredible.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 month

I had LASIK done yesterday and I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced a bigger miracle of science. 10 minute completely painless procedure and I woke up with 20/20 vision. I’ve been wearing glasses since I was 8. Just wow.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

And here is why you don’t tax unrealized capital gains.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

4 years

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

11 months

Every single person who has ever moved to San Francisco:

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

4 years

Companies founded in 2008/2009: 🏡Airbnb ⛅️Cloudflare 🐙Github ☁ Nutanix 📟PagerDuty 📌Pinterest 💌Sendgrid ＃ Slack ⏹Square 💳Stripe ☎️Twilio 🚖Uber 💬WhatsApp 📣Yammer

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

10 months

Everyone in the world knows Central Park, and yet Golden Gate park is actually 20% larger.

Christopher Michel

@chrismichel

10 months

Uncommon views of San Francisco

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

7 months

Slow evolution of a NYTimes headline. "Israeli Strike" -> "Strike" -> "Blast"

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 year

Californians looking at NYCers reacting to the wildfire skies

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

5 years

Sure we have electric scooters, but have you tried wearable wings attached to jet engines?

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

10 months

@pitdesi @notgwendalupe Or the Starbucks in Game of Thrones

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

10 months

Periodic reminder of the greatest slide of all time.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

4 years

VCs: “please make sure you get someone to design your slides or nobody will take you seriously.” Warren Buffet:

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 month

Just had my morning after follow up — vision is actually 20/15 😱

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

I made a lot of mistakes as a founder. But, one thing I don't regret is fighting tooth & nail for visas for every single engineer we brought to the US. Once in a while when I catch up or check their LinkedIn, seeing where they are & knowing how well they're doing makes me happy.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

It's been almost 10 years since one of my most embarrassing fundraising moments as a founder. A moment so embarrassing that I couldn’t talk about it for years. It taught me the difference between raising a Seed round and a Series A, as well as some well needed humility.🧵👇

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

Just a reminder on competition and crowded spaces: By the time DoorDash was founded, GrubHub, Caviar, Postmates, and OrderAhead all existed and were venture funded. Didn’t matter. Today, DoorDash is going public at 4x of those competitors combined validation.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 year

Fewer drunk drivers. Fewer distracted drivers. Fewer road rage drivers. Fewer people needing to own cars. Better vehicle utilization efficiency, leading to fewer vehicles on the road, leading to lower emissions. But sure, other than that, "good question." 🙄

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

We should just take this to its natural conclusion and tax people simply for thinking of making money.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 year

A blacked-out train secretly crossing Eastern Europe while carrying the US President evokes a powerful image.

Nandita Bose

@nanditab1

1 year

Pool pic by @EvanVucci of @POTUS on the train from Kyiv to Poland.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

. @AOC currently on Instagram showing off her League game where she stole Baron as Lux. 😄

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 year

Fundraising in 2021 vs Fundraising in 2023

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

Hearing from founders in India that the demand for talent has gotten so high that they're now looking for talent in eastern Europe.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

11 months

Every so often I'm reminded of this great and short talk at TED'09 by Arthur Benjamin: Teach probability and statistics, not calculus for the majority of high school students.

Teach statistics before calculus!

Someone always asks the math teacher, "Am I going to use calculus in real life?" And for most of us, says Arthur Benjamin, the answer is no. He offers a bold proposal on how to make math education...

www.ted.com

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

6 months

Whatever happened at OpenAI over the past 24 hours may end up being the clearest example of "startups die by suicide, not homicide"

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

Tip for founders: If you want your investors to read your investor updates, don’t send them as a pdf, notion link, google doc, docsend, or anything else that adds friction. Send them as a plain text email.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

6 months

I own a Model 3 and a Model Y, so it's not like I'm anti-Tesla, but I'd rather live in the world that Rivian envisions than the world the Cybertruck envisions. The Cybertruck feels so dystopian.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

11 months

It has taken us a long time to get to the Apple Vision moment

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

These two graphs side by side are a red alert for American growth and innovation

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

VC friendships = VCs saying "we should do deals together" over and over again until one of them dies.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

One of the hardest things in startups is not dismissing ridiculous-sounding ideas. I still regularly have to actively stop and and ask myself — what if it does work? What sounds ridiculous today may be a mainstream $100B business a decade from now.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 year

More founders applied to YC W23 than ever before. Downturns are for builders.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 month

A YC W24 founder searching for an apartment for the batch was offered a rent discount in exchange for the delta as an uncapped MFN SAFE. SF is the best.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

One of my favorite questions to ask, both during YC interviews and when I meet founders in general, is “what is something surprising you’ve learned about your users”. It’s one of the hardest answers to fake that also demonstrates real engagement with your customers.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

5 years

2019 B2B/Enterprise IPOs: 🏓 PING - $1.28B ⏩ Fastly - $2.02B 📟 PagerDuty - $2.15B 💠 Medallia - $3.51B ⚙️ Dynatrace - $5.31B 🌤Cloudflare - $5.35B 🐶 Datadog - $9.47B ️#️⃣Slack - $12.0B 🦅 Crowdstrike - $12.08B 📹 Zoom - $20.80B It's a good time to build an unsexy business.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

5 years

By far the most common sales conversation that plays out during office hours with companies: Founder: we want to hire a sales person, can you help us? Me: how many deals have you closed? F: none yet, that’s why we want to hire someone... Me: don’t do it!

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

In engineering, A players hire A players and B players hire C players. In management, A players hire A players and B players hire yes-men who won’t disagree with them.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

The final 747 *ever* is being assembled right now. A true end of an era.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

7 months

NYT has 16 photos on the home page attached to this article. Scroll through them. 11 of them are of the action in Gaza. Of the 5 about Israel, one shows a dog that was rescued. None show or even *hint* at the gruesomeness of the civilian murders of the past 24-48 hours.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

I think of this incident every demo day cycle when I meet founders who are crushing their raises. I remember what that was like, and I also remember what followed. Don't be like me — have a plan. And, if you're doing a B2B/Enterprise business, learn to sell ASAP🙂

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

10 months

Almost every person who reads How to Win Friends and Influence People internalizes only one thing (“repeat the persons name”) and not the most important thing (“become genuinely interested in others”).

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 month

@Vuojolahti Hard to find something else you can invest in with such near-universal acclaim.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

5 months

A high school student reverse engineered the iMessage protocol and published a cross-platform proof of concept.

iMessage, explained

This blog post is going to be a cursory overview of the internals iMessage, as I’ve discovered during my work on pypush, an open source project that reimplements iMessage.

jjtech.dev

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 month

A number of people have asked where I got it done. I did it with Dr. Manche at Stanford's Eye Laser Center. He was great, is a leading researcher in the space (many of the papers I found while researching LASIK were written by him), and trains other doctors on the procedure.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

5 months

If you're a founder with less than ~12 months of runway going into 2024, you have to re-read @paulg 's The Fatal Pinch. Assume you will NOT get a bridge round, and figure out what other options you have ASAP.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

@paulg It looks like a satire about a great dictator. Something out of a Wes Anderson movie.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

5 years

PagerDuty was an early lesson for me in investor omniscience (or lack thereof). In my YC batch they had more trouble raising money than many because they HAD customers, and investors were blinded by the ACV of the early customers. Today their ACV is $10k+ with >200 at $100k+.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 month

A non trivial number of founders have similar @sama stories. Some investors love to boast about how much they help startups. Others just help, quietly.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

@ThatGuyCapital I was talking about the public markets but you do you

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 months

You come at the king, you best not miss.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

Jeff Bezos wakes up in retirement, looks at VCs: "Your margin is my opportunity" 😱

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

Having worked with hundreds of founders over 1000+ office hours, no stage in startup life elicits as much excitement as getting those early signs of product market fit where suddenly it feels like you’re pushing the boulder down the mountain.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

10 months

An interesting side effect of working on hard problems is that it opens up a talent pool that is unavailable to others because there are some smart people that also only want to work on hard problems, regardless of the probability of success.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

4 years

Filecoin is already 5.75x cheaper than Amazon S3’s base tier — Filecoin: $0.048/GB/year AWS S3: $0.276/GB/year

Anish Agnihotri

@_anishagnihotri

4 years

📂 With today’s @Filecoin launch, I was curious how much it actually costs to store data on the network. So, I spent 2hrs and built a website where you can see it too:

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

9 months

Klavyio’s founder owns 38% at IPO. This is the power of only burning $15M from seed all the way to IPO. Keep your burn low, your growth high, and own more of your startup.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

11 months

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 month

Maybe I will have a disposal ceremony to get rid of all of my leftover contact lenses and old glasses.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 month

@cn8011 😂 That is a very accurate step by step description. No music for me though, we just chatted throughout the thing. It's like a dentist experience but without the pain.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

Today I officially became an American citizen! 🇺🇸 Incredibly grateful to the dozens of people who have helped make this a reality. Especially in this time of global turmoil, I’m excited to belong to a place that really does give life changing opportunities to so many.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

11 months

I remember the first time I drove into SF after moving to Palo Alto in 2010. I showed up in shorts and a T-shirt in July and was very unpleasantly surprised

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

Yes, let’s fire the visionary CEO who against all odds created a global cult following of millions of people for a *stationary bike* that goes nowhere. 🙄🙄🙄 I hear John Sculley is available.

Reuters

@Reuters

2 years

Activist investor Blackwells pushes for Peloton CEO exit, sale

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

5 months

@emilykmay This is a very sweet story that I was worried was going to go in some very different direction!

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

It is absolutely wild to me that (NYSE:BILL) is growing at 156%/year with $800M ARR. Anyone that has ever used it will tell you the UI/UX for that product leaves a lot to be desired, but it solves a real pain point and is super sticky.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

Sequoia Capital was founded in 1972. New York Times CEO was born in 1971. You can't explain that.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

4 years

OilBnB -- we convert your home pool into an oil storage facility and charge a low 15% storage fee.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

4 years

A VC friend just showed me their internal note from March 2015 talking about Honey having *incredible* traction and raising $500K @ 12M cap. They couldn’t get there because they felt the valuation was too high 😬

TechCrunch

@TechCrunch

4 years

PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B by @sarahintampa

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 month

@asap_gordon Most LASIK procedures are bladeless now :) it's all a laser.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 year

The last 747 to be built is in the air right now en-route to Cincinnati. But first it took a small detour to draw a crown for the queen of the skies

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 months

We were promised flying cars and instead we’re getting: Supersonic jets. Telepathic neural interfaces. Advanced defense systems. Humanoid robots. Self driving cars. Interplanetary Starship rockets. Incredible AI. This decade is already exceeding expectations🤩

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

4 years

Evergreen HN comment: "Seems over priced. A small team can make something similar in a few weeks."

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

4 months

Stress is no joke for your health. The most stressful period in my life as a founder triggered an autoimmune condition for me that I still deal with today.

Katherine Wu

@katherineykwu

4 months

I'm kicking off 2024 by heading into a scary surgery next week (more info in thread if you’re curious). Stress was an onset trigger (among others) for me and I've learned the really hard way that health >> everything else. Nothing else is more important than you feeling 100%.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

. @sama lost his bubble talk bet by ~months. Current Status: #1 -- Uber/Palantir/Airbnb/Dropbox/Pinterest/SpaceX = ~$240-260B (depending on where Airbnb ends up) #2 -- Stripe+Instacart+Coinbase blow this out of the water. Not even close. #3 -- Gitlab.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

7 months

Come on. 975 still rounds up to a unicorn.

TechCrunch

@TechCrunch

7 months

Atlassian to acquire former unicorn Loom for $975M by @ron_miller

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 months

Reddit is not the first YC IPO but it feels like a particularly important one. The first company from the very first batch.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

9 months

Investors really underestimate to what extent founders remember bad behavior and will warn others even years later.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

10 days

Startup that's transitioning from selling to other startups to selling to enterprise

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 year

Median valuations for Q1-Q3 2022 across >1K deals logged by Cooley Series D: $3.5B Q1 ➡️ $527M Q3 Series C: $502M Q2 ➡️$130M Q3 Series B: $164M Q2 ➡️ $90M Q3 Series A: $58M Q2 ➡️ $45M in Q3

Data | Cooley GO

Stay Ahead of the Curve: Latest Financing Trends

www.cooleygo.com

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

“In 2019, before the pandemic, @Flexport did $650 million in revenue. Last year, revenue over $3 billion. This year, it is on track for $5 billion, according to Petersen ( @typesfast ).”

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

Everyone always says startups are hard, but how hard? Nearly 5 years after exiting my startup, I am still dealing with a chronic health issue (psoriatic arthritis) triggered by the stress of the last year of running the startup. Sometimes you end up with literal startup scars.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

“We had nurses, pharmacists, physicians, even those that are not part of the hospital, coming to help,” said Judson Howe. “It was all hands on deck and a true community effort.” Good! This is how this whole process should be done.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

9 months

Founders, if you're in the fortunate position to have AWS/etc credits, don't treat them as "free money." Instead, treat it as extra cash on your balance sheet that you can only use for one purpose, and count your AWS usage as part of your burn. Don't wait until they run out.

Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

An all-too-common statement I see in investor updates: "Our AWS credits ran out this month, so our burn went up by $XX" Actually, your burn was already +$XX, you were just masking it by taking money from an account that is not your bank account. Don't treat credits as "free!"

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 year

@loganbartlett The real question is has ChatGPT weighed in on the benefits of not drinking alcohol.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

11 months

If SF was more forward thinking they would use self driving cars as a tourist attraction — “come experience the future!”

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

By far one of the most infuriating bank wire behaviors is removing a $10 fee from the total being sent instead of just adding the fee. If I'm sending someone $1,000 I am intending to send them $1,000, not $990. The recipient is expecting $1,000 not $990.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

A Hacker News launch captured in two comments:

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 year

VC is definitely not for everyone but this thread is unfortunately full of misconceptions. The 10% number is for companies at IPO (and all these IPOs were multi-$B). The company examples he gives were also companies founded in 04-05 when the VC market was significantly less

@levelsio

1 year

Imagine having 4 cofounders at a VC funded startup 🥹 Selling for $100M Diluted to 10% ownership by VCs Tax takes 50% Go home with $1.25M cash after 6 years working 7 days a week 12 hours per day or $47/hour Many people on Upwork make more than that!

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

4 years

You almost never need the “brand name” hire. Hiring is just a different form of investing — find the best people before everyone else knows they’re the best, and work with them.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

9 months

What you’re actually paying for with YC is improved odds. Fish where you want to fish, but the next best alternative has 0-40% of the hit rate, and going out on your own is even harder.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 months

Crypto is a dangerous speculative asset that consumers have to be protected from, but this $9.7B publicly traded business with $3.5M in revenue is totally fine.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

A founder I know received an O-1 visa while legally in the US and had to fly to Brazil to get his visa stamped. He's been there for a week waiting (he gave them his passport on Monday, got it back Friday). Why Brazil? It was the only country that had appointments pre mid-2023.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 year

If AI really is the Next Big Thing, VCs who have a deep technical CS background (which they‘ve kept sharp) will have a really big advantage.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

Be the kind of investor founders refer friends to even if you passed.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

2 years

The value of all 950+ unicorn 🦄 startups is $3.1T — less than this year’s *increase* in market cap of *all* of Microsoft/Google/Apple/Nvidia/Tesla/Facebook combined. We are still very early.

Jon Erlichman

@JonErlichman

2 years

Increase in valuations this year: Microsoft: +$885 billion Google: +$761 billion Apple: +$687 billion Nvidia: +$427 billion Tesla: +$422 billion Facebook: +$176 billion Total: +$3.4 trillion

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

1 month

@StudentofLife07 @tombielecki 20/20 just means that you see at 20 feet what most people see at 20 feet. You could have 20/15 or 20/10, which means that you see at 20 feet what most people see at 15 feet or 10 feet.

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

4 months

I’m not a consumer investor but wow this is such a bullish signal for consumer startups. Would 💯 bet against the wisdom of the VC crowd when it comes to what the next big thing will be.

The Information

@theinformation

4 months

Venture capitalists have given up on the idea that they’ll make their career finding the next hit consumer marketplace, retail brand or media company. Dealmaker by @KateClarkTweets

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 years

A startup I know just experienced such crazy hypergrowth that they had to use a log graph to properly show their growth. 🚀📈

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

4 years

SEC is having it's own S-1 Demo Day

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Yuri Sagalov

@yuris

3 months

Whatever your startup is doing, you’re probably not dreaming big enough.

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