š² Change the odds of your activism
Or: Why I think YC is the single biggest odds changer for outsider founders.
I sat down to write a quick tweet about encouraging founders to spend 20 minutes today and just put in a YC application. But my mind, and the words that flowed from my fingers, quickly turned to thoughts on activism, and change. Odds, and light in a sea of evil and darkness.
In nearly a decade of being a founder, all I have learned with any certainty is this:
the world will break your heart with its beauty and its horror. And again and again, the only way I can deal with it is to focus on the change I can make. The better I can will into existence.
I think the truest expression of entrepreneurship is an extreme desire to impose your will on the world. To say: I see a world that is like āthisā and I believe in it so much, that Iām willing to devote intense, verging on irrational, amounts of time on it. Whether itās driverless cars, a cancer treatment, a pizza joint or dog walking service.
Mine is to spend my days seeing and solving my own frictions, that are also reflected in other women. Parents. Everyday communities.
I think: This, however you would otherwise define the word, is activism to me.
Activism is via capitalism. Of building something that others value and is measured in the currency of what our modern society holds most dear.
And if you believe that to be true, as I do, then we need as many people pursuing their change in this way. In building the better for their own lives, in the image of how they experience the problem. How their communities experience it.
Itās a surprise to no one that we donāt have nearly enough women or people from lower socioeconomic upbringings or marginalized groups feeling like this form of work and activism isnāt available to them.
There are so many reasons why, but a big, under-talked about one is: we rarely have the safety nets needed to persist through the many impossible years of this work. First, to be funded and get paid salaries that de-risk the days and months and years. Then to be in the networks that āacquihiresā and soft landings are made of, for the many cases when failure is certain, but āfailing upā is not. And lastly the support to persist through this failure, to begin again. Where the true breakthrough lies for so many.
I used to expend so much energy on trying to change all of these realities and now I focus all my energy on just one:
Building the biggest, most impactful company I can and making everyone involved as rich as possible.
Because thatās where the true power and the change lies. In bringing the right people along for this mission - team, investors, users. And one day getting to a place where they can more broadly go out and spread their impact and activism, backed up with the safety net of dollars.
Thatās it. Beautifully simple and epically hard.
But hard I can do. Hard you can do.
So then: who are the people and the places that will disproportionately change the odds in my favor?
The odds have always been abysmal for a kid of immigrants, raised on the plains of Saskatchewan, no savings or fall-back jobs, with a Chemistry degree but labeled as ānon-technicalā, trying to realize an ambition that sits squarely at the intersection of humanity and technology.
But odds can be changed.
In fact, my job is to change them. Like any odds calculator, whether for a football game or an election, veering improbably from one side to the other, I work from Impossible to Inevitable.
And if you ask me to pin the single biggest jump in odds in my favor I would have to tell you:
Being funded by YC.
Becoming a part of this impossible to describe network of fellow activists and builders. The sheer ambition will take your breath away. The no-BS-focus-on-building-something-the-world-wants, rubs many the wrong way. But itās perfectly in line with how I believe in building.
And when the job to be done is improving my odds, I have yet to find a single other action that will improve them more - especially in those tenuous early years.
You donāt have to believe me. My job is not to convince anyone of anything.
But I will say this, especially if you see any of your story in mine. This is all a game of odds. And there is nothing to lose in taking 20 minutes and filling out a form.
Sure, what youāre building might not be a fit for YC. Mine hasnāt been a fit for countless investors, potential employees and even users. Thatās okay. Iām not building for everyone and if isnāt a fit, itās better I move on to find the ones for whom it is.
And conversely, YC, once you get to the end of the process, might not be a fit for your activism. And this is a step that too few founders think about - if you had the chance to get funded by YC, be very clear about what odds they change for you. Why that 7% is worth it FOR YOU. Itās a question all of us should ask more often before putting anyone on our cap tables - investor or employee. These are the people Iām committing to work to make rich so I can support their activism. They better be worth it.
I canāt tell you whether YC is worth it for you. Whether anything is really.
All I know is that in a time when we need more good, more light, more builders, Iām thinking of odds.
And all the noise aside, Iām betting on whatever improves those odds for the kinds of builders we need more of.
So apply. Or donāt. But find the thing, the people, the places, that change the odds for your activism in outsized ways.