Startup Experts Discuss Doing Things That Don't Scale | Office Hours

**Erin** (0:00)
There's nothing like that founder FaceTime in the early days, right? And that's a great example of something that doesn't scale, but that's so important in recruiting customers, recruiting employees.

**Nicolas** (0:09)
Anything you can do to optimize for these learnings is good to do. And doing things that don't scale, I think the main goal is that. How much can I learn?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:19)
In 2013, Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, wrote an essay entitled, Do Things That Don't Scale. And this essay transformed the culture of Silicon Valley. PG said, not to worry about the theoretical problems of scaling and fix the thing in front of you right now. Do everything you possibly can to get early customers and delight them. Even if it meant doing things in a manual and one-off way. The essay created a playbook for startups who needed to get from zero to one.
And many of them made it and they're making it right now. So today we'll hear from the YC Group Partners about the best examples of companies that did unscalable things to get off the ground. Let's get started.

**Dalton** (1:18)
So I think to start with, to set us up, what I remember from being a founder in the early 2000s is that investors and people in general at big tech companies were obsessed with this word, scalability. Because the issue with the internet and the issue with websites was that people created these early web servers, processors were pretty slow, the size of bandwidth is pretty slow. And so if you wanted to build an internet company, and if it only could serve 10,000 or 100,000 people, and the site crashed, it didn't scale.

**Jared** (1:49)
It was actually pretty hard to scale.

**Dalton** (1:50)
It was a real problem. This meant in addition to technically scaling, which in this case just means the servers can handle the load, it also meant business models had to scale. A scalable business model would mean a business model that does not top out at a small amount of money. It's a business model that could go all the way into making billions of dollars.

**Jared** (2:09)
I actually think Google is indirectly responsible for basically warping the minds of a whole generation of founders and investors and creating the problem that Paul Graham had to solve with this essay, which is because Google became so famous for this because they did so much content marketing, everybody wanted to emulate Google. And so everybody from day one wanted to do the same thing and to be thinking about how they were going to build something that was as scalable as Google.

**Dalton** (2:35)
And you wouldn't be able to raise a dollar from investors if you do not have a scalable solution, period, full stop. And again, I'm not saying this is wrong, but this created the elephant in the room when you are a founder during that era. And I would argue to a lesser extent still to this day, was if you did not have good answers to how your product or solution or business model scaled, it was not considered a venture capital fundable company. Paul Graham heard this problem because many Y Combinator companies were obsessed with this thinking of scalability for all the reasons I just mentioned. And so he had to invert it and say, the opposite, ignore this.

**Jared** (3:12)
And he wrote this essay with this amazing title, Do Things That Don't Scale. And this essay, I would argue it transformed the culture. Like it actually transformed, not overnight, but over the years that followed, it actually transformed Silicon Valley culture. And it became ingrained in the psyche of the current generation of founders.

**Dalton** (3:30)
I agree, because what he realized was the biggest problem that most startups have is they can't get users and they're not making something people want, not that their architecture is not scalable enough. Think about how many startups build something, this beautiful thing.

**Jared** (3:50)
That has like so much scalability.

**Dalton** (3:51)
And no one wants it. It's like if you build it, they will come. It's the Field of Dreams startup, right?
It's this beautiful thing and you hired a big team and it's like you got all the servers set up and you're ready to scale.

**Jared** (4:04)
You got a cheap architect in place.

**Dalton** (4:06)
And like no one cares and everyone churns. It's game over, right? And so this Do Things That Don't Scale.

**Jared** (4:14)
And at the time, it was such a contrarian title.
I would say it's analogous to Mark Zuckerberg's Move Fast and Break Things. Do Things That Don't Scale. It sounded at the time like somebody was crazy. It was so contrarian.