Harj Taggar @harjtaggar Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

2 years

Younger founders especially fear the threat of bigger companies because they’ve never worked at one.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

Years ago, some advice from my sister helped me become happier - you can't expect to get everything you need from a single relationship or person. Find people who give you a part of what you need, accept them for the parts they don't and find others to provide the rest.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

4 years

That's pretty baller

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

2 years

It’s not just that B players hire C players. It’s that they want to hire *a lot* of C players.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 month

Actually, I think he spent the last decade building a $13.5 billion company.

David Sacks

@DavidSacks

1 month

You were sanctioned by the SEC. Nobody else, only you. But you’ve spent the last decade trying to shift the blame onto others for your own poor ethics. 🤡

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

Personally, I’d avoid investors who feel the need to tweet this about a startup they passed on.

Jason Palmer

@educationpalmer

5 years

$174M lessons here. We passed on @Altschool multiple times, mainly because disrupting school was a terrible strategy, but also b/c founders didn’t understand #edtech is all about partnering w/existing districts, schools and educators (not just “product”)

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

When I have kids someday, I think the most valuable thing I could teach them is being comfortable around people and opinions they disagree with.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

1/ Today I prepared for talking about common mistakes startups make (founding -> growth stages) by writing it in tweet form. I ramble too much when public speaking and hoped it would make the core ideas clearer in my mind and more concise. Think it worked. Here are the tweets

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

I shared the Lyft company history timeline at our all hands today because it's amazing to remember the founders worked on zimride for *5 years* before launching Lyft and then 7 more years competing with Uber (imo the best first 6 years of startup execution ever) before IPO.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

Having a vision for your startup doesn't mean predicting the future, it means having a framework for making decisions quickly. Without this, you move too slowly and die through indecision or arguing internally. The vision can change and optimally it does via expansiveness.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

6 years

The best habit I've formed this year is waking up and meditating for 15 minutes firs thing. Not even sure it's technically meditation, just sitting still in silence, transforms the day.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

Some rich people keep working hard because they love doing what made them rich. I've found three other types (not mutually excl): the ambitious who keep moving the goalposts, the creatives who keep finding new passions and the calvinists who are afraid to not be working hard

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

Talking fast is a tactic used by some people to sound smarter than they are. It's also how some extremely smart people talk naturally. The difference is the output of ideas. Extremely smart people who talk fast also output a lot of ideas per minute.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

7 years

Having a useful skill and using it to help people pro bono is by far the best way of "networking"

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

Yes, the fall from an $80 billion market cap to only $76 billion on the first day of trading must be existentially devastating

Jessica Lessin

@Jessicalessin

5 years

"This is a sign. Uber, which was the most hyped [of the private tech companies], coming down to earth, does say something." @timoreilly

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

Going to a good college changed my life by recalibrating my ambition. My parents left school at 16 and emigrated to work (multiple) minimum wage jobs. Realizing I was at least as smart as more privileged peers kids was very liberating.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 months

Tesla Full Self-Driving drove me to and from work this morning (Palo Alto -> SF). It worked amazingly well and still blows my mind it was an over the air software update. What a time to be alive.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

Today a founder working on personalized customer support emails using LLMs told me they saw increased response rates when they changed the email signature from “Assisted by AI” to “Assisted by ChatGPT”

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

In the first three months of 2018, 18% of bay area engineers on @triple_byte expressed interested in relocating elsewhere. In the first three months of 2019 it was 34%.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

8 years

We were skeptical of bootcamps at first. Now I think they should exist for every subject. 3 month sabbaticals for intense learning = future.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

8 months

One theme of this year has been seeing companies start moving faster after reducing headcount. Literally doing more with less.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

Startups struggle to raise a Series A because they're not growing fast enough, not because they raised their seed round at a 20m SAFE

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

9 months

Except the people working longer hours also tend to be the ones delivering excellence

Adam Grant

@AdamMGrant

9 months

Hey CEOs: When people don’t want to work long hours, it doesn’t mean they’re lazy. It means they have lives beyond work. A team delivering 40 hours of excellence is worth more than one offering 50 of mediocrity. What counts is the value people create, not the time they put in.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

6 years

I wrote a post on how to choose a startup to work at by thinking like an investor. I believe advice to ignore value of equity and focus on learning is wrong. How likely you think a startup is to go public should be the most impt factor in your decision:

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

4 months

He who labels the data controls the narrative

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

3 years

Congratulations to the @ycombinator S21 companies! It's been a privilege working with you 🙏

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

3 years

If you think of "growth stocks" as companies built around a product, they'll always appear overvalued. If you see the company itself as the product and it's led by an ambitious founder, there's always more upside.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

I’ve had so many great spontaneous conversations since going back to an in-person office culture, it’s hard to believe there was a period during Covid that I believed remote work was better

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

6 years

1/ I’ve lost a lot of weight over the past couple of years and been asked a lot about the story. Here goes, tl;dr - starting a company was bad for my health and took me a while to get it back.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

4 years

I'm very excited to be back at YC! YC changed the trajectory of my life when I left England to take part in the 2007 winter batch and it will do the same for the hundreds of founders who will lead the upcoming economic recovery.

Y Combinator

@ycombinator

4 years

We’re excited to welcome @aaron_epstein to the YC Team, and welcome back @harjtaggar !

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

8 years

Watching Nigel Farage preemptively declare victory just now for "real, decent people" is one of the most chilling things I've ever seen

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

You want confidence to be one of your attributes but not the first one people pick to describe you

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

Messages like this from a founder in the current YC batch soften the blow of Triplebyte not growing to the size I'd hoped it would when founding it ♥️

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

Anyone writing about daily stock price fluctuations should get free passes to astrology conferences so they can swap techniques, knowledge share, cross pollination of ideas, etc.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

One reason transparency scales as your company grows is reducing CEO workload. You can just share the same data (literally the same slides) with board, investors and team. The same principle applies generally to the benefits of being honest with people.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

6 years

Fitness companies using tech + incentive alignment + social dynamics (Barry's, Soulcycle, Peloton, etc) are obv disrupting gyms. Curious what else they will disrupt as exercise becomes gamified and sticky. Alcohol and pharmaceutical companies potentially.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

2 months

This is what passes as journalism at TechCrunch these days 😐

Autism Capital 🧩

@AutismCapital

2 months

This is a real TechCrunch article.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

One technique for helping pivoting startups find a new idea is telling them since they're failing anyway, they may as well go out with a bang by being self-indulgent and picking something to work on just because it seems fun

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

7 years

Descriptions of company culture/values would have more signal if they discussed trade offs instead of listing adjectives

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

Smart early stage investors grill you about the market size mostly to figure out how smart you are. They know the biggest markets in the future look small today but they may as well ask you about your assumptions instead of just asking you to solve random math problems.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

4 months

The best enterprise software founders can map human processes to software and resist the enormous pressure to do the opposite.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

It’s not irrational for early stage investors to judge founders on their confidence during a pitch, even if its how they often get tricked by fakers. Projecting confidence under stress is one of the most necessary skills you can have if you’re taking your startup all the way.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

6 years

I'd bet that starting last year with Dropbox, there will be at least one YC company IPO'ing each year for the rest of my lifetime.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

One way to hire the best programmers is by explicitly making it a company value that headcount will never be an implicit internal metric of success. This won’t be a huge competitive advantage right now but if you can keep it once the bull market returns, it will be.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

20 days

It’s pretty magical coming home after a couple of days away to a 2 year old who is over the moon to see you ♥️

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

This but for haircuts

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

9 years

How to pass a programming interview:

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

4 years

After this, we might permanently raise the bar for in-person meetings, for efficiency. Much initial vetting can be done online (dating, networking, technical skills, renting apartment, buying house). In-person meetings become more substantive (negotiation, culture fit).

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

How I do first (20 min) phone screens: (1) Ask how much you know about us (2) Talk about our mission and vision (3) Explain how this role fits into vision (4) Ask for a summary of your career so far, why leaving current co, what's next? (5) How ready are you to move now?

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

8 years

Empirically 90% of startups use "fast moving, open and transparent" to describe culture. Use something else to close the best engineers

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 months

One way you can tell wokeness has peaked is by re-reading Coinbase’s 2020 mission focused company memo. If published today it’d seem bizarre to say it was triggering.

Coinbase is a mission focused company

I want Coinbase to be laser focused on achieving its mission, because I believe that this is the way that we can have the biggest impact on the world. We will do this by playing as a championship...

www.coinbase.com

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

2 years

The longer term the incentives, the higher quality the people

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

3/ If you launch, next mistake is chasing top-line vanity metrics (sign ups) instead of growing the number of users who *really* love you. @paultoo advice - better to have 10 users who depend on you than 100 who a lukewarm. This requires patience and killing your ego.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

6 months

If you understand why Twitch and TikTok were able to beat Youtube, you'll understand why YouTube for AGC (AI Generated Content) is a giant idea

Y Combinator

@ycombinator

6 months

🥚 @eggnog_ai (YC W24) is building the YouTube for AI-generated content. Anyone can create, watch, and remix AI videos on Eggnog and build their own cinematic universe. Congrats @SamuelMGPlank and @jitsvm on the launch!

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 month

I’m not sure if optimism or energy comes first but I know they fuel each other and you need both to do great things.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

8 months

A sleep tracking app that always says your deep sleep was amazing and your mind is ready for anything

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

4 months

Five of the seven trillion dolllar technology companies were started by founders who were college dropouts or never had a job after college. In our latest Lightcone episode, we talked about why young founders have an advantage in building the huge outliers

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

3 months

Scale is the fastest growing startup in the world right now and they’ve coined a new acronym for hiring, MEI: Merit, Excellence and Intelligence. Kudos ⁦ @alexandr_wang ⁩ — “No group has a monopoly on excellence’”

Scale is a meritocracy, and we must always remain one.

MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence

scale.com

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 months

It's possible to build one of the best foundation models for a specific use case, even if you're 21 years old with no ML background so long as you're willing to teach yourself what you need to know. @snowmaker explains how @SonautoAI were able to do this for their text to song

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

4 years

It turns out to be especially rewarding to do office hours with new YC startups after reading about the ones you did office hours with eight years ago, going public.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

2/ Earliest mistake is picking the wrong co-founders. You have to be value-aligned (don’t have conflicting personal goals) and respect each other. With both of these, any other differences are irrelevant - can be worked out. Without them everything else you do is irrelevant.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

When you consider all the parameters in picking and delivering a single grocery order, it’s mind boggling to imagine Instacart does it 263 *million* times a year. Congratulations ⁦ @apoorva_mehta ⁩ ⁦⁦ @Max ⁩ and team 👏

Instacart Files for IPO, Shows Growing Profitability

Instacart said it increased its profit during the first half of the year in documents filed ahead of the company’s long-planned initial public offering.

www.wsj.com

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 months

Sounds like Meta has since deprecated the “bring your whole selves to work” policy. Another sign we are past peak wokeness.

John Carmack

@ID_AA_Carmack

5 months

@hmltn @PalmerLuckey I am a non-activist libertarian. We never did any kind of a policy belief comparison, but I suspect I am mostly aligned with Palmer. I never had a problem working with anyone based on what their political beliefs are, as long as it stayed out of the work. Unfortunately, FB

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

4 months

One formula for coming up with AI startup ideas is look for any software company that makes lots of money by charging for integrations

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 months

Software eats the world lowered the perceived importance of technical founding teams. AI eats the world has raised it way back up. Hard to argue this doesn’t explain why the perceived average quality of startups has also gone up.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

Retail space in cities being replaced by spaces for group physical activities that create community. Like antibodies against urban loneliness/depression.

As retail withers, Bay Area gyms flex their muscles

Bay Area residents who have resolved to work out more in 2019 have plenty of...

www.sfchronicle.com

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

4 years

@semil @Initialized @garrytan Garry made this happen. He made sure Brian got a YC interview and worked with him closely during YC. Garry said we should invest first even though it wasn’t a hot round (at all) and then pushed for us to double down and give them more runway until he could help them raise an A.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

Focus on two things when asked about your career history at an interview (1) explaining decisions you made at each company that had a measurable impact (good or bad) (2) an overall narrative for why you left each company and chose the next one

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

6 years

Good podcasts interviews with non fiction authors have created the content I always wanted - concise summaries of the actual book. They're incentivized to be dense vs filling pages to make publisher happy.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

Instacart (YC S12) was a contrarian idea to work on in 2012. The zenith of "Uber for X" ideas had passed and the consensus was only yuppies would pay premium for grocery delivery. It took a special founder to work on it, congrats @apoorva_mehta !

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

6 years

8/ It’s easy to convince yourself your health isn’t important when running a startup. Founders, take care of yourself. I now feel better, have more energy and @triple_byte is doing better than ever. Everyone benefits, my friends, family and team.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

Practicing gratitude has been powerful for me because it instantly displaces all other emotions.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

Novice, overconfident VC meets fundraising specialist founder is when the fun stuff happens.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

Being an early stage startup founder and an active angel investor sends a negative signal to your team. Reinforces a class divide and perception of not being all in (yes it’s rational to diversify but irrational belief is what people follow and what stops them starting their own)

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

The impulse to network with famous founders is so strong you can use it as a filter to identify who genuinely cares about startups. If you have access to famous founders but willingly spend more of your time with new ones, that reveals what you care about.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

Part of what makes investing in startups very early so great is getting to participate in the moments where the founders start believing in how big their idea could be. It’s more thrilling than giving them advice about company building once things are working.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

7 months

Looking at the ideas coming out of a YC batch is like core sampling what smart founders find interesting to work on right now. That's why the ideas change batch to batch, nothing to do with the partners (by design, we have no idea which idea is the next Airbnb).

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

Common founding CEO criticism: Makes too many decisions. Common non-founding CEO criticism: doesn't make enough decisions.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

Excited to announce our Series B! Welcome @ycombinator continuity, @foundersfund , @ROWGHANI , @briansin and thanks to our team, users and early investors for getting us this far!

TechCrunch

@TechCrunch

5 years

Triplebyte raises $35M for its online coding test and credentialing service for hiring engineers by @ingridlunden

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

6 years

That's why it's not a good job for status seekers. The returns are in finding the next great founders, not schmoozing with the current ones.

Micah Rosenbloom

@micahjay1

6 years

Hard lesson of investing is that everyone starts as a nobody until they’re somebody. But we’re in the business of finding nobodys before they’re somebody.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

10 years

Only recently became consciously aware of one method for lifting myself out of a bad mood - do something nice for someone.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

9 years

Noticing growing trend of engineers using positive impact on the world as criterion for where they want to work.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

There's been a void in tech journalism ever since @arrington retired. Specifically, a good writer relentlessly motivated by discovering the next famous founders more than networking the current ones.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

4 years

This note is so impressive in both form (honest, heartfelt writing) and substance (dropping one year cliff for recent hires). Sympathies to everyone at Airbnb affected by the layoffs.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

Late stage investors giving founders early stage fundraising advice

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

9/ Avoid all of these...and there's still myriad other ways you could fail so don't attach too much of your identity to the outcome of your startup :-)

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

4 years

Wandavision is a wonderful show and this line is beautiful: "But what is grief, if not love persevering?"

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

3 years

Marketing leverages good sales. Sales leverages good product. Product comes from good founders.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

Time does seem to pass faster the older you get, at least for me. One benefit has been it feels easier to work on things for a longer period of time. When younger, if I wasn't achieving a goal within 6 months it felt like an eternity and would grow impatient.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

7 months

One thing that’s made office hours with the AI startups in the current YC batch so fun is imagining what their software might be capable of doing in the future. We can throw out crazy ideas knowing it might only be a few months before they don’t seem crazy anymore.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

4 years

Many of these predictions from @paultoo in 2010 of what 2020 would look like turned out to be unerringly accurate, especially #10 :

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 years

6/ With growth, retention, and focus - now you have to scale team. Two types of mistake, hiring too slow and too fast. Product focused founders likely to hire too slow (don’t want to delegate, like the details), business-minded founders likely to hire too fast.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 month

Cooking dinner for the YC S24 founders using @t_blom ’s chilli recipe

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

Congratulations to all the founders who made it through the @ycombinator s23 demo day! Still amazes me how much the best people can get done in 12 weeks.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

7 months

Building stuff for yourself is the classic way to find good startup ideas. If you’re stuck, narrow it down to something you’d be a power user of. Power users do things differently to regular users. What do you do differently to your friends or colleagues?

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

1 year

Six months into fatherhood and each morning starts with going into my daughter’s room and watching her wake up and start smiling as she realizes we’re there.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

2 years

Finally found the perfect Christmas gift to inject some much needed anxiety into this holiday season for my friends and loved ones 📉

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

5 months

OpenAI's Sora is a combination of a transformer model and a diffusion model with an added temporal component. YC Partner @sdianahu explains in detail how it works and why it's a huge breakthrough.

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Harj Taggar

@harjtaggar

6 years

Perfect Saturday

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