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Delighted to share that Bits has received authorisation for credit broking and lending permissions from the FCA 🎉
Details of these permissions are on our FCA page
Two exciting new features in Bits app:
1. AI personal finance assistant- you already have your data connected to us for rent reporting and your credit; why not get some actionable budgeting and money management insights out of it?
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My parents came to this country as immigrants and built a life. The promise that made that possible, the idea that you can build something from nothing if you solve a real problem for real people, is the most powerful engine of upward mobility on earth.
AOC’s narrative doesn’t touch the billionaires she’s describing. They’re already rich. Her words reach the kid in the Bronx, the kid in Fremont, the kid from an immigrant family who might have built the next Airbnb but just heard from a congresswoman that it’s impossible.
The path to a billion dollars is the same as the path to a functioning company: make something people want. And nobody needs AOC’s permission to start.
AOC says you can't earn a billion dollars.
But Paul Graham, who spent 20 years predicting which founders become billionaires, has the evidence to prove her wrong.
garryslist.org/posts/yes-you…
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Don't join a company or industry that has contempt for its customers. You can make a lot of money that way, and of course it gives you a feeling of superiority, but you'll never do great work for a market you despise.
Dalton was one of my group partners. He’s awesome. Top 0.001%. Consider yourself lucky if you get the privilege of working with him.
The first Standard Capital Series A deadline is in 6 days.
Cost: ~1 hour to fill out an application (and the questions help you think about your business).
Benefit: Raise your Series A in 2 weeks with clean terms:
- No board seat
- 10% dilution
- Post-PMF founder community/support for the life of your startup
The value proposition is simple: minimal downside + unconstrained upside.
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"Startups take off because the founders make them take off."
Paul Graham on doing things that don't scale:
Here’s a question I use when interviewing- too many people fail it.
Say you have a credit card with a £70 limit, which is 70% used, and you pay off £7. What’s your ending balance?
Numbers are more complicated than words for most people and that makes credit all the more difficult to understand.
Proud to support immigrants and diversity in all forms.
88% of our staff is non British born. 97% speak more than one language. 83% are Asian, black or other minorities.
We are stronger because of who we are, we are better at serving our customers because of who we are.
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About 6.5% of recent YC batches become worth $1B or more.
About 25% of those go on to become worth $10B or more.
There is no other place you can go where you have this kind of ability to meet these outliers all in one place four times a year: YC Demo Day
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Actual traits of successful founders:
Good at building.
Genuinely interested in the problem.
Very determined.
Talks a lot to users.
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the best way to get good at something is usually to just practice actually doing the thing in question.
a lot of very capable people outsmart themselves with complex plans that involve working a lot on fake prerequisites.
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What is the path to startups worth billions of dollars? Great startups are not born. They are forged. Tracking their origins gives you a peek at what your journey might be like.
youtu.be/HB3l1BPi7zo?si=MzOF…
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At the YC Alumni Reunion, I got lots of questions from new founders about how to build a successful company, but realized that they all had the same answer. And it’s this:
—————————————————
DO TOO MUCH
As a new founder, I’d often look at the CEOs of successful companies and wonder, “How do they do it?”
As Scale grows and as I learn on the job, I’ve come to realize that leaders of great organizations never just do it. They overdo it.
As a leader, you are the upper bound for how much anyone in your company will care. You need to do more, care more, attempt more than would seem reasonable. It will seem like overkill. But too much is the right amount.
This is true in big and small ways.
- What people say is overoptimism is just optimism.
- What people say is overcommunicating is just communicating.
- What people say is overdelivering is just delivering.
- What people say is micromanagement is just management.
- What people say is ruthless prioritization is just prioritization.
Actually living this way will seem crazy, and that’s ok. There is no Apple without Jobs’s “obsessive” attention to detail. There is no SpaceX or Tesla without Elon’s “maniacal” drive for execution. I have never seen ordinary effort lead to extraordinary results.
If we had not done too much, Scale would not be the company it is today.
When AI really started to take off in 2022 and “generative AI” became a thing, within 6 months Scale shifted the vast majority of our team to working on generating data for scaling LLMs.
Most companies would go through quarters of bureaucratic planning cycles and only move after a competitor started eating their lunch. In our case, the change was drastic and abrupt — some might say jarring or extreme.
What people might have reasonably described as overreacting was just reacting. And in hindsight, that reaction to developments in AI was what made Scale’s subsequent path possible, including growing 4X over the last year.
What we’ve accomplished to date represents the compounded results of everybody embracing the culture of overdoing. Scale will do things incumbent companies wouldn’t, because it’s simply too scary or painful, but others not going to the same lengths is a feature not a bug.
Creating something meaningful is a beautiful, and yes, scary and painful thing. And if you’re not overdoing it, you’re underdoing it.