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Author: matt

over-educated, ex-Air Force officer diving into technology startups and founding one in particular: howstr.com

The Forest And The Trees And The Leaves And So On

We think in networks but we have to communicate in sentences. Sometimes we can sketch out a diagram or find a stock photo, which saves a bunch of words.

But even using multimedia doesn’t seem to save us time in the long run. Whatever we produce still only works for a certain audience and it still falls out of date. We keep pushing the rock up the hill just to have it roll back down. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s always the lingering feeling that someone else has probably already explained this if only we could find it.

What we’re dealing with is the cost of getting thoughts in and out of our heads. The conversion doesn’t come cheap. It’s like trying to live-tweet through Burning Man using Morse Code.

I think we can solve most of this problem if we can keep information related to itself while it’s outside of our head.

Hello Howstr

Howstr is the startup I’m leaving the Air Force to found. It’s like Google for how-to knowledge. Howstr makes complicated projects simple so that people can build the same stuff when they aren’t in the same place. This is the story of where the idea came from, where it’s at now, and where it’s going.

In Which I Get Excited, And Then Disappointed, By Sam Altman’s Latest Post in The Macro

I say that the stuff Y Combinator (and the people associated with it) has put out over the years is the core of my startup education. There’s always something valuable in what they share.

However, this one has me a bit confused. Sam Altman (Y Combinator) asked Michael Moritz (Sequoia Capital) some vague question about why Sequoia is so dope. Then Michael answers. Then Sam says “that was an incredible answer.” What happened in between was apparently so great it was pulled out of the normally private YC dinners and fixed in text for all time.

It stands to reason that both of these people know what they’re talking about, and that this excerpt must be the best bit of them talking about what they know. So, logically, diving into this transcript should be more valuable than most other things I could spend my time on.