- The video discusses the concept of overthinking and how it can be detrimental for founders.
- Overthinking often occurs because founders feel lost and unsure of what to do, leading them to overthink decisions.
- The advantage of being young and not knowing much is that it allows for a more simplistic approach to problem-solving.
- Examples of this approach can be seen in Elon Musk's ventures, where his ideas may seem foolish or genius depending on perspective.
- The video also mentions a meme about fundraising advice, highlighting the difference between naive, smart, and overthinking approaches.
- Overthinking can also be seen in the context of launching a minimum viable product (MVP) and finding co-founders.

- Founders should focus on the important aspects of their startup rather than overthinking certain decisions.
- Applying to YC should not involve excessive time spent on the application process.
- Product-market fit should be recognized when it is obvious, rather than overthinking metrics.
- Certain decisions, such as legal and regulatory issues, should be thought through carefully.
- Most of the work in startups is taking action and not over-optimizing.
- Success in startups often comes from a beginner's mind and a simple approach.
- Don't overthink and have fun while focusing on what is truly important.

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel on the midwit meme, how it applies to startups, and the best example: Elon Musk.
Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 
00:00 - What is the idiot approach?
00:52 - How and when can overthinking be bad?
01:47 - Advantage to be young
02:37 - Example - Elon Musk
05:30 - Midwit Meme - Fundraising
07:02 - MVPs
08:20 - Co-founders
10:16 - Applying to YC
12:03 - Product Market Fit
13:17 - Trapdoor Decisions
14:34 - Framework
16:21 - Beginner's Mind
16:45 - What Do I Need To Unlearn

This is the beauty of the Midway meme is the genius and the idiot come to the same conclusion.

Like that's actually how you can divine the genius approach.

Everyone can reach for the idiot approach.

Everyone has the intellectual capacity to reach for the idiot approach.

This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell.

Today we're going to talk about how overthinking is sometimes a founder's biggest mistake.

So Dalton, this video was triggered by this amazing meme that you made on fundraising advice.

But before we get to the meme, because I think it's like 1 of the best memes I've ever seen for fundraising advice.

mean, I think that what people think being a founder is, is what they saw in like watching the Facebook movie or popular television where you're like coding a lot and you're making deals and screwing over your friends.

But in reality, it's a lot of feeling lost and being not sure what to do and feeling stressed out a lot.

And every decision, you kind of think in circles over and over and over again because you don't have a boss, you don't have constraints when you're a startup founder, right?

There's no 1 really telling you what to do, so you're on your own.

And so when you, the experience of being a startup founder is to always be overthinking everything.

In this way, there's a bit of advantage to being young, right?

You and I experienced this ourselves as founders where we were young when we first started and this is the beauty of not knowing anything.

The beauty of not knowing anything is that you think everything is easy.

And none of the innumerable reasons why something might be hard or your startup might fail even occurs to you.

And so again, this is like the midway beam, right?

Where if you don't know anything, your approach looks a lot like the approach of people that are really good founders and the worst place to be is that you know just enough to know why the things you're trying are hard and the odds are stacked against you and that freaks you out.

So Dalton, 1 of the most perfect examples of this is actually Elon Musk.

And why I think it's so perfect is that depending on how you tell the story, Elon looks like the dummy or the idiot, right?

Like, I'm sorry, the dummy or the genius, right?

Depending on how you tell the story, and it almost doesn't matter, right?

But, you know, to me, the first example that I always loved is that, you know, I read some book about the starting of SpaceX and it started with Elon going to Russia trying to buy like rockets and like the Russian government being like there's this American billionaire guy who wants to buy rockets and kind of not believing it, but Elon just looking really serious.

And like, they eventually said no, but like he got to talk to people about buying rockets from them.

And like with Tesla itself, like to me the midway is electric cars are good.

In the middle it's like, no 1 has successfully done a startup car company since the 50s and every single, if you look at all prior attempts to build an electric car, like there's all these words.

And I think the 1 that we find most funny, which we'll see, this video we'll see if we stand the test of time, is the boring company, right?

Drilling holes under the ground so that you can drive places faster is very clearly the idiot 1, but like it could be the genius 1

It's exactly, It's a beginner's mind idea, which is like traffic is bad.

What if we dug a hole under the ground to get to downtown Las Vegas?

What's funny is you read all the critiques of this, like the Midwest, I was like, well, bus systems already exist.

It's much more efficient to optimize transportation.

You know, there's lots of words in the middle of that, but you know, drill tunnel to avoid traffic is certainly at the extremes.

And you kind of see him approach all of his problems this way where you can imagine it being the same sort of ideas that we, like Mars is cool.

Like this is the kind of stuff we come up with as teenagers like

The hard work is in the implementation, but the idea isn't very complicated.

And like the V1 is kind of simple-minded.

And if he was an overthinker, he would rule all the stuff out.

All this stuff is like obviously a bad idea.

And anyone in the Midway territory would rule out all these ideas.

Let's go through some examples of the Midwet meme.

And you have to start with the meme that you made for YC Founders.

So just to provide context, we're in the part of the batch where YC Founders start getting nervous about fundraising.

And whenever a founder gets nervous, they start overthinking.

And whenever they start overthinking, They assault us with office hours on topics.

And Dalton created this meme so that we could fight back.

The naive founder is like, oh, I'm going to raise the amount of money I need to succeed.

I need, I need, here's the amount of money I need to raise for my series A.

I ran a model and it's, you know, $800,000, so that's what I'm gonna raise.

The really smart 3, 3, three-time founder, someone that's done this before, is like, I need to raise $800,000, so I'm going to do it.

And then the midwit is the 1 who wants to ask 15 questions and try to construct the perfect round and be afraid that they may not have enough allocation for value-add investors and they want to not have a signaling risk.

And there's like all these factors where I'll be talking to someone and we'll be like 15 levels deep in a hypothetical for an offer that they don't have, right?

And that's the midway, man, is that you're screwing yourself by overthinking all this stuff.

Instead of just being like, hey, I need X dollars, I'm gonna raise it and I'm gonna get back to work.

1 of the questions that I love getting from a founder is, before we launch your MVP, how do we know we're going to be able to survive the onslaught of traffic and users that will

yeah, the 2 extremes of the MidWit meme are launch something fast.

And the middle 1 is like, well, I don't want to get a bad reputation that my thing was buggy and we only have 1 shot to launch.

I don't want people to see my idea and copy it, so it's got to be perfect.

And then do we do like a TechCrunch post or is it better to try to get the New York Times or like What about Hacker News?

We need to get all 3, so how do we coordinate them together?

We wanna be featured in the New York Times, and so how do we optimize for that?

Yes, we have to rebrand, because there's a name that's kinda similar to ours, We don't want people to be confused.

Like I am a business person and I'm good at sales.

I need to find a marketing co-founder and an engineer, like a CTO who's already managed 50 people because we're going to grow fast.

Yeah, Dalton, I'm open to the idea of a co-founder.

And what I really am looking for is someone with at least 5 to 7 years of experience at Google who made it to at least a level 7.

And so, you know, I haven't found the right person yet, but we're looking for it.

Yes, When we find them, I'm totally open to bring out a co-founder when I find that 1.

But first we're going to raise money and then I think that will attract a better co-founder.

So again, the point we're kind of making is not that any 1 of these ideas is the 1 people say.

It's that It's thinking in circles and having a thousand different reasons that the person that should be your co-founder is no 1 that you currently know.

And then let's talk about the other sides of the equation, right?

On the dumb side, the founder's like, it's fun to work with my friends.

On the smart side, the guys like- Justin Khan likes to put a camera on his head.

Like, why didn't they pick you as their co-founder?

Well, cause I helped them find an apartment and open up

All right, he's the co-founder of Twitch, done.

And then like the super smart experienced founders like, oh, having co-founders viable for emotional support, I know this is going to be tricky.

Next, this is a classic 1, especially because you have to deal with so many admissions questions.

Applying to YC, Dalton, what is the Jedi founder move to apply to YC versus the Midwit founder?

Yeah, the extremes of this and the Midwit meme are, I filled out my application and submitted it.

The Midway founder is like, gee, I don't know if now is the right time to apply.

I'm going to write a draft of my application and send it to 15 people, and I'm going to get feedback on my application, and I'm going to like, I need an introduction to alumni, and I need to talk to alumni and I need recommendations.

Yeah, I need recommendations from strangers that don't know me.

Like you talk to people that like put months of effort into their application to YC strategy.

And then you talk to people and they're like, oh yeah, I just filled it out in 30 minutes and

I spent all that other time working on my company.

we're not saying do a bad job on your application.

We're just saying, trying to tweak out on this is like something that you can spend tons and tons and tons of time on.

I'm not sure that's a great allocation of resources.

And I think that's like maybe the essential point here is that like we want you to spend time on the important stuff for your startup.

Like we're trying to get you to avoid spending time on the things that won't help you.

Next, and here's kind of a classic 1, is product market fit.

And what's the mid-width approach to product

Yeah, the mid-width approach for this 1 is to be not sure if you have it and create 15 different metrics and like a complicated series of thoughts that maybe you have it or you have early product market fit versus the extremes of this meme.

The extremes of this are like, am I overwhelmed with demand?

Like you don't have to think very hard when you have it.

It sort of like hits you over the head when you have product market fit.

Dalton, I think the extremes in the meme is like, did I sleep last night?

Do I have time to wonder if I have product-market fit?

If you have time to wonder about it, if you're like, gee, do I have product-market fit?

So we talk about all the situations where maybe overthinking is not a good idea.

But you also describe, you know, there are certain situations, you call them trap door decisions, when maybe you wanna think a little bit harder than before making a move.

Like saying you didn't know there was a law is not a great legal defense.

Regulatory issues, similarly, oh, I didn't know that I couldn't launder this money.

You may want to overthink that and look into it.

Things that affect people's health and well-being.

You should really spend the time worrying about people, right man?

Let's not be fast and loose if we're building an online pharmacy.

And I think that what really good founders do is they are very good at figuring out are they dealing with something like that or are they not?

Because even within legal, right, there's certain things that are like, oh, this is like whatever, and there's certain things that are like really bad.

So, I think that like the framework here is really twofold.

1, don't overthink when you don't have to.

And then 2, remember that like, most of the work, most of the work is not in these over-thinking games.

Like most of the work are not in these over-optimizing games.

It's launching, it's getting the first customer, it's selling, it's doing these things yourself.

And that's counterintuitive because I think that founders understand that startups are really hard, so they assume you need complex strategies to succeed.

This is hard, we would need a complex strategy, right?

It's like, what actual kind of strategy do you need?

I think if you haven't seen really successful startup companies, either personally, like where you were the founder of 1, or you know people and you saw them go through it, it's hard to believe how silly these things are when they start.

Like, I think unless you've literally witnessed it personally and you've seen the silly shit that goes on and like how, what it really takes to get big, your brain rejects the idea that that's actually how these companies got built.

It had to be like lots of strategy meetings and whiteboarding, you know, flow charts and you know, Gartner magic quadrants of like, like, like, I think you really, your brain won't allow you to see that.

Actually here's a nice way to say it is you know the term beginner's mind.

And a beginner's mind is like I guess I'm going to build a product and I'm going to give it to people.

So you might find yourself after watching this video asking yourself, what do I need to unlearn?

Because again, this is the beauty of the MidWit meme is the genius and an idiot come to the same conclusion.

Like that's actually how you can divine the genius approach?

Everyone has the intellectual capacity to reach for the

So With all that being said, have fun and don't overthink it too much.

Don't overthink it too much and make sure that you have a little bit of something in your head that's asking yourself, is this the thing that's really important?


Speaker 0: This is the beauty of the Midway meme is the genius and the idiot come to the same conclusion. So what is the idiot approach? Like that's actually how you can divine the genius approach. You're like, what would an idiot do?

Speaker 1: Everyone can reach for the idiot approach. Everyone has the intellectual capacity to reach for the idiot approach.

Speaker 0: If I didn't know anything.

Speaker 1: This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. Today we're going to talk about how overthinking is sometimes a founder's biggest mistake. So Dalton, this video was triggered by this amazing meme that you made on fundraising advice. But before we get to the meme, because I think it's like 1 of the best memes I've ever seen for fundraising advice.

Speaker 0: For fundraising.

Speaker 1: Let's start

Speaker 0: in general. Let's start

Speaker 1: in general. How can overthinking be bad? And when can overthinking be bad? Yeah, I

Speaker 0: mean, I think that what people think being a founder is, is what they saw in like watching the Facebook movie or popular television where you're like coding a lot and you're making deals and screwing over your friends. Just kidding. But in reality, it's a lot of feeling lost and being not sure what to do and feeling stressed out a lot. And you're worried all the time. And so you tend to overthink everything.

And every decision, you kind of think in circles over and over and over again because you don't have a boss, you don't have constraints when you're a startup founder, right? There's no 1 really telling you what to do, so you're on your own. And so when you, the experience of being a startup founder is to always be overthinking everything.

Speaker 1: In this way, there's a bit of advantage to being young, right?

Speaker 0: Yeah. You and I experienced this ourselves as founders where we were young when we first started and this is the beauty of not knowing anything. The beauty of not knowing anything is that you think everything is easy. And none of the innumerable reasons why something might be hard or your startup might fail even occurs to you. You're like, oh yeah, I'm 22.

Like everything's easy. I can figure this out, right? And so again, this is like the midway beam, right? Where if you don't know anything, your approach looks a lot like the approach of people that are really good founders and the worst place to be is that you know just enough to know why the things you're trying are hard and the odds are stacked against you and that freaks you out. And so you think about it a lot, right?

Speaker 1: So Dalton, 1 of the most perfect examples of this is actually Elon Musk. And why I think it's so perfect is that depending on how you tell the story, Elon looks like the dummy or the idiot, right? Like, I'm sorry, the dummy or the genius, right? Depending on how you tell the story, and it almost doesn't matter, right? Because he's winning.

But, you know, to me, the first example that I always loved is that, you know, I read some book about the starting of SpaceX and it started with Elon going to Russia trying to buy like rockets and like the Russian government being like there's this American billionaire guy who wants to buy rockets and kind of not believing it, but Elon just looking really serious. So they like considered it. And like, they eventually said no, but like he got to talk to people about buying rockets from them.

Speaker 0: He's just a dude with money. He was like, Go to Russia, buy rockets. Like that's the extreme. Is that genius or stupid? I can't tell.

I can't tell. And like with Tesla itself, like to me the midway is electric cars are good. That's the extreme. Electric cars is good or I'm both. In the middle it's like, no 1 has successfully done a startup car company since the 50s and every single, if you look at all prior attempts to build an electric car, like there's all these words.

Speaker 1: Yes. And the infrastructure you need

Speaker 0: is done. Like he was like, electric car

Speaker 1: is good. Yeah. Yes. And I think the 1 that we find most funny, which we'll see, this video we'll see if we stand the test of time, is the boring company, right? Drilling holes under the ground so that you can drive places faster is very clearly the idiot 1, but like it could be the genius 1

Speaker 0: too, right? It's exactly, It's a beginner's mind idea, which is like traffic is bad. What if we dug a hole under the ground to get to downtown Las Vegas? What's funny is you read all the critiques of this, like the Midwest, I was like, well, bus systems already exist. It's much more efficient to optimize transportation.

You know, there's lots of words in the middle of that, but you know, drill tunnel to avoid traffic is certainly at the extremes. Yeah. And you kind of see him approach all of his problems this way where you can imagine it being the same sort of ideas that we, like Mars is cool. Like, yeah, Mars is cool. Like this is the kind of stuff we come up with as teenagers like

Speaker 1: a lot

Speaker 0: of his ideas.

Speaker 1: Yes. The hard work is in the implementation, but the idea isn't very complicated. And like the V1 is kind of simple-minded.

Speaker 0: And if he was an overthinker, he would rule all the stuff out. All this stuff is like obviously a bad idea. And anyone in the Midway territory would rule out all these ideas. Yes. Right?

Speaker 1: Yes. And they still do. They still do. It's the Tesla short seller, right? Let's go through some examples of the Midwet meme.

And you have to start with the meme that you made for YC Founders. So just to provide context, we're in the part of the batch where YC Founders start getting nervous about fundraising. And whenever a founder gets nervous, they start overthinking. And whenever they start overthinking, They assault us with office hours on topics. And Dalton created this meme so that we could fight back.

What does the meme say?

Speaker 0: Yeah, the meme is simple. The naive founder is like, oh, I'm going to raise the amount of money I need to succeed. I need, I need, here's the amount of money I need to raise for my series A. I ran a model and it's, you know, $800,000, so that's what I'm gonna raise. That is the like naive approach.

The really smart 3, 3, three-time founder, someone that's done this before, is like, I need to raise $800,000, so I'm going to do it. And then the midwit is the 1 who wants to ask 15 questions and try to construct the perfect round and be afraid that they may not have enough allocation for value-add investors and they want to not have a signaling risk. They talk a lot about signaling risk. And there's like all these factors where I'll be talking to someone and we'll be like 15 levels deep in a hypothetical for an offer that they don't have, right? And that's the midway, man, is that you're screwing yourself by overthinking all this stuff.

Instead of just being like, hey, I need X dollars, I'm gonna raise it and I'm gonna get back to work.

Speaker 1: This comes up a lot with MVPs. 1 of the questions that I love getting from a founder is, before we launch your MVP, how do we know we're going to be able to survive the onslaught of traffic and users that will

Speaker 0: come on our launch day?

Speaker 1: What's the MidWit play? What's the MidWit meme for your MVP? I mean,

Speaker 0: yeah, the 2 extremes of the MidWit meme are launch something fast. Build something fast and put it out. And the middle 1 is like, well, I don't want to get a bad reputation that my thing was buggy and we only have 1 shot to launch. And you know, like you come up with.

Speaker 1: What about the press? We got to do a press launch. It doesn't have to be an event.

Speaker 0: Yeah. I don't want people to see my idea and copy it, so it's got to be perfect. Yes. That's 1.

Speaker 1: And then do we do like a TechCrunch post or is it better to try to get the New York Times or like What about Hacker News? We need to get all 3, so how do we coordinate them together?

Speaker 0: We wanna be featured in the New York Times, and so how do we optimize for that? Or, oh, what should we name the company? How about, I don't.

Speaker 1: Yes, we have to rebrand, because there's a name that's kinda similar to ours, We don't want people to be confused. How about co-founders? I hear this a lot. Like I am a business person and I'm good at sales. I need to find a marketing co-founder and an engineer, like a CTO who's already managed 50 people because we're going to grow fast.

How does co-founders, how do you see

Speaker 0: this thing go? Yeah, Dalton, I'm open to the idea of a co-founder. I just haven't found the right person. And what I really am looking for is someone with at least 5 to 7 years of experience at Google who made it to at least a level 7. And so, you know, I haven't found the right person yet, but we're looking for it.

Speaker 1: Yes, When we find them, I'm totally open to bring out a co-founder when I find that 1.

Speaker 0: But first we're going to raise money and then I think that will attract a better co-founder.

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 0: So again, the point we're kind of making is not that any 1 of these ideas is the 1 people say. It's that It's thinking in circles and having a thousand different reasons that the person that should be your co-founder is no 1 that you currently know.

Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. Right. And then let's talk about the other sides of the equation, right? On the dumb side, the founder's like, it's fun to work with my friends.

So I'm just going

Speaker 0: to start with my friend. Right? On the smart side, the guys like- Justin Khan likes to put a camera on his head. You know, you're like, this is our guy. Like, why didn't they pick you as their co-founder?

Wasn't it like...

Speaker 1: Well, cause I helped them find an apartment and open up

Speaker 0: a bank account. There you go, boom. This guy helped us find an apartment. All right, he's the co-founder of Twitch, done.

Speaker 1: There you go, done. And then like the super smart experienced founders like, oh, having co-founders viable for emotional support, I know this is going to be tricky. They have all the sophisticated reasons. Same answer. Same answer.

I love that. Okay. Next, this is a classic 1, especially because you have to deal with so many admissions questions. Applying to YC, Dalton, what is the Jedi founder move to apply to YC versus the Midwit founder?

Speaker 0: Yeah, the extremes of this and the Midwit meme are, I filled out my application and submitted it. I applied. The Midway founder is like, gee, I don't know if now is the right time to apply. I don't know if we're ready. I'm going to write a draft of my application and send it to 15 people, and I'm going to get feedback on my application, and I'm going to like, I need an introduction to alumni, and I need to talk to alumni and I need recommendations.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I need recommendations from strangers that don't know me.

Speaker 0: I'm gonna do a lot of research. Like you talk to people that like put months of effort into their application to YC strategy. Yes. Not correlated with success. And then you talk to people and they're like, oh yeah, I just filled it out in 30 minutes and

Speaker 1: got in. I spent all that other time working on my company. To be clear,

Speaker 0: we're not saying do a bad job on your application. We're just saying, trying to tweak out on this is like something that you can spend tons and tons and tons of time on. I'm not sure that's a great allocation of resources. No.

Speaker 1: And I think that's like maybe the essential point here is that like we want you to spend time on the important stuff for your startup. Like we're trying to get you to avoid spending time on the things that won't help you. That's the idea. That's the idea. All right.

Next, and here's kind of a classic 1, is product market fit. Dalton, do I have product market fit? And what's the mid-width approach to product

Speaker 0: market fit? Yeah, the mid-width approach for this 1 is to be not sure if you have it and create 15 different metrics and like a complicated series of thoughts that maybe you have it or you have early product market fit versus the extremes of this meme. Early product market fit. Everyone's got early fit. Yeah.

The extremes of this are like, am I overwhelmed with demand? Like you know it when you see it. Like you don't have to think very hard when you have it. It sort of like hits you over the head when you have product market fit.

Speaker 1: You should know. Dalton, I think the extremes in the meme is like, did I sleep last night? It's like, I didn't sleep last night.

Speaker 0: Something has to be going well. Do I have time to wonder if I have product-market fit? That's, yes, yes. If you have time to wonder about it, if you're like, gee, do I have product-market fit? Let's pontificate on this.

That probably means

Speaker 1: you don't. Yes, let's make some reports. So we talk about all the situations where maybe overthinking is not a good idea. But you also describe, you know, there are certain situations, you call them trap door decisions, when maybe you wanna think a little bit harder than before making a move. So what are some examples of those?

Speaker 0: Yeah, so, legal issues. Don't break any law. Like saying you didn't know there was a law is not a great legal defense. Regulatory issues, similarly, oh, I didn't know that I couldn't launder this money. Probably not great.

You may want to overthink that and look into it. Things that affect people's health and well-being. Yeah, you should overthink that. You should really spend the time worrying about people, right man?

Speaker 1: Let's not be fast and loose if we're building an online pharmacy. Let's measure twice, cut once. And I think that what really good founders do is they are very good at figuring out are they dealing with something like that or are they not? Because even within legal, right, there's certain things that are like, oh, this is like whatever, and there's certain things that are like really bad. Michael,

Speaker 0: should I file patents for all of my IP? Exactly. That's a classic overthinking.

Speaker 1: Absolutely not. Probably not. So, I think that like the framework here is really twofold. 1, don't overthink when you don't have to. And then 2, remember that like, most of the work, most of the work is not in these over-thinking games.

Like most of the work are not in these over-optimizing games.

Speaker 0: Yeah it's action. Taking action and not thinking, right?

Speaker 1: Yes, yes. It's launching, it's getting the first customer, it's selling, it's doing these things yourself. And that's counterintuitive because I think that founders understand that startups are really hard, so they assume you need complex strategies to succeed. And it's like, oh, that's a hard thing. It makes sense when I say it, right?

This is hard, we would need a complex strategy, right? How do you respond to that? It's like, what actual kind of strategy do you need?

Speaker 0: I think if you haven't seen really successful startup companies, either personally, like where you were the founder of 1, or you know people and you saw them go through it, it's hard to believe how silly these things are when they start. Like, I think unless you've literally witnessed it personally and you've seen the silly shit that goes on and like how, what it really takes to get big, your brain rejects the idea that that's actually how these companies got built. You're like, nope, not true. It had to be like lots of strategy meetings and whiteboarding, you know, flow charts and you know, Gartner magic quadrants of like, like, like, I think you really, your brain won't allow you to see that. Actually here's a nice way to say it is you know the term beginner's mind.

You want to have a beginner's mind. That's what the Midway meme is. And a beginner's mind is like I guess I'm going to build a product and I'm going to give it to people. I guess I'm going to deliver burritos. That's a beginner's mind approach.

Speaker 1: That's the game. So you might find yourself after watching this video asking yourself, what do I need to unlearn? Yeah. How can I

Speaker 0: have a beginner's mind? Because again, this is the beauty of the MidWit meme is the genius and an idiot come to the same conclusion. So what is the idiot approach? Like that's actually how you can divine the genius approach? It's just like what would an idiot do?

Speaker 1: Everyone can reach for the idiot approach. Everyone has the intellectual capacity to reach for the

Speaker 0: idiot approach. If I didn't know anything.

Speaker 1: So With all that being said, have fun and don't overthink it too much. Don't overthink it too much and make sure that you have a little bit of something in your head that's asking yourself, is this the thing that's really important? If not, I can move on. If not, I can move on. All right.

Thanks a bunch, Alton. Thanks.

Speaker 0: Thanks.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Elon Musk & The Midwit Meme – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel