"The easiest thing to do...is to fool yourself." Paul Buchheit talks about how important it is to fail in order to move past failure. Founders are often biased and have a positive outlook that their business will work out, but it's extremely important to confront reality early and honestly. Too many entrepreneurs get trapped in their own optimism, collecting vanity metrics and cherry-picking data that supports their vision. Paul's perspective comes from decades of building products at Google, creating Gmail, and investing in hundreds of startups through Y Combinator. He's seen countless founders who could have saved months or years by being more honest about what wasn't working. We're bringing back one of the most loved episodes of @FoundersInArms this week. More insights from @paultoo (Gmail Creator & Former YC Partner) on our classic Founders in Arms episode. Link in bio.

We (@Mercury) now has a dedicated routing number with both our partner banks: Choice Financial and Column Bank. Small but nice user experience improvement. Took surprisingly long to unlock :)

As a serial entrepreneur, @immad was frustrated with the lack of services available for new businesses from traditional banks. So, he took action and launched @mercury in 2019 to provide better banking services to businesses. Today, Mercury serves more than 200,000 ambitious customers. Hear his founder story to learn more about Mercury’s incredible journey. #Fintech #Entrepreneurship #FTACEOSummit

All this Windsurf/Scale stuff goes to show you that if FAANG was really unleashed from antitrust, the M&A spree we would see would be truly insane.

I have to register a DBA (doing business as) name (for my wife's business) and I just found out that you have to do an archaic process of publishing the name 4 times in a physical newspaper! Takes 30 extra days. Its like SF is trying extra hard to make small businesses harder.

My iPhone voicemail is 100% full of spam and there is no mass delete. So dumb.

"Yeah, they're not hardcore enough." That's how Ryan Westerdahl explained the difference between people who thrive at SpaceX versus those who burn out. After nine years there, he's blunt about what it takes. Building something meaningful requires that level of commitment. The question isn't whether it's hard - it's whether you care enough about the outcome to push through when it gets uncomfortable. More from @RyanWesterdahl (Founder & CEO, Turion Space) on our latest Founders in Arms episode. Link in bio.

I did a bunch of space investing around 2018-2022. Seen less recently because a lot of the interesting ideas got filled during that period. When I'm looking at space investments, there are three things I care about: Does this person know what they're talking about? How interesting is the idea and how commercial is it? How good is the pitch? Software companies need a lot of customers to get to $10M revenue. But if you can crack government spending or commercial use cases in space, there's serious money available. More from @RyanWesterdahl (Founder & CEO, Turion Space) on our latest @FoundersInArms episode. Link in bio.

I’ve never shared this publicly before, but here goes: 2.5 yrs ago, I was diagnosed with one of the most painful, life-changing diseases: rheumatoid arthritis The surprising part? I beat it and recovered only when I stopped following my doctors’ advice. Here’s my story 👇

The first version of Coinbase launched with just a hot wallet - a risky proposition. We were in beta and the app prominently told people not to store any money there they couldn't afford to lose. But the amounts of deposits kept steadily rising. I realized we needed to build build a cold storage system to improve security (otherwise a single hot wallet breach would mean we were insolvent and the company would die), and called the two cryptography/security experts I knew (@zooko and @octal if memory serves) and asked them what the best architecture would be. They were super helpful and gave me a crash course, since I had never built such a system before. I asked them how long it would take to build and I remember one of them said it might take a team of ~10 people 18 months to get it all up and running and tested. The problem was we had about 8 weeks until the total deposits on the platform would exceed the total assets of the company, and only 2 engineers (including myself) to build it. We were seeing signs that hackers were already trying to break in, a true do or die moment. @satoshilite and I buckled down and set about coding the new cold storage system from scratch, and integrating it into the app. We made some reasonable trade offs but what we came up with was fundamentally secure, and a massive improvement. We even unboxed some new laptops for key generation, stored backup material across several safe deposit boxes and locations. With about a week remaining, we started the process of transferring funds over to the new system. We were both extremely sleep deprived (how mistakes happen!), and paired up to double check each others work as we sent over the first test transaction, then a bigger one, and so on until it was fully transferred. We breathed a sigh of relief and went home to sleep for about 12 hours. This was one of my proudest technical accomplishments from the early days of Coinbase: coding our v2 key storage system with 2 people in about 8 weeks, which should have taken 10 people 18 months. And it worked and served us well for years. We're now on ~v5 of key storage, and have advanced way beyond what we came up with that day. But if we hadn't gotten it out in time, Coinbase very well may not exist today. It's a great testament to how constraints breed creativity, top talent matters in startups, and teams are often capable of more than they think when there is no other option. Most products which succeed have early moments like this, where someone has to step up and make a play on the field that defies all the odds. As we face new challenges and deadlines across our many products, I always look out for who on the team is ready to step up and make the game winning play on the field.