Amber 🦧

Q1 2026 was the largest quarter for venture investment ever recorded. More charts: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…

github.com/AmberSahdev/Op…

[last personal post] people don't talk about how the hardest part of doing a startup is... losing all of your friends. if you went to stanford or worked in SF for a long time, creating a startup might seem like an obvious path. with so many people in your world interacting with startups (maybe even your friends), there's not a loss of shared experience if you do a startup. this is NOT the case in the Big Tech, especially if you were working outside of the bay area. i can't overstate how *few* startups i interacted with prior to YC, up to and including newer cloud startups like GCP and Azure (which I honestly didn't realize people used before talking to other startups). it's even worse if you're doing something that runs against conventional wisdom. i spent all of 2023 and 2024 arguing that putting an SSD file system in front of S3 was the right thing, and basically everyone told me that either: - it would never work well enough - nobody would ever need that product - why not spend 6 years building the "right" thing (an entirely new, incompatible version of S3) these factors meant that it was WEIRD that i was doing a startup, and that my friends were mostly neutral to negative on the whole endeavor. because of this social pressure, i almost certainly wouldn't have even started Archil without someone like @dessaigne accepting my YC application as a mark of belief. to be fair, YC did warn us about the social challenges. at the beginning of our batch, @garrytan mentioned that one way to think about this was that you needed to surround yourself with people who were nothing but supportive, and to expect that they could be different. @amiklas chatted about how a few years after college, his friends were all getting promoted and he was running a 50 person company, which just led to a lack of shared experiences. over the past year, i mostly fell out of contact with just about everyone that i used to work with, which was hugely disappointing for me personally. that said, i'm happy to be standing up for something that i believe in (file systems, of course). and now that they've launched S3 Files - 3 years later - i couldn't be happier for them. because, to me, it's not actually about winning (even though we will), it's about the joy of being able to solve customer problems. .. and maybe a little bit happy to see that I turned out to be right on the approach all these years later.