Paul Buchheit

There is a deeper truth which I struggle to fully articulate: Truth is a story. Narrative shapes Truth. Truth flows from Narrative. "That's not true", your story says, "I have facts!" But facts alone are meaningless. The Narrative determines which facts are relevant and reliable, provides the context and meaning, labels the heroes and villains, and declares what is accurate information and what is harmful misinformation. And so we are ruled by stories, Narrative. All of our most divisive issues are ultimately a war of narrative. We may argue over facts, but the real conflict is narrative, and the struggle for who controls The Narrative. These narratives are unavoidable. We can't make sense of the world without them. But we can become aware of them, stepping back from the conflict to realize that both sides are each working from within their own narrative bubbles. The path to peace is not in domination, one narrative wiping out all others, but in understanding. We can develop a meta-narrative that recognizes and integrates all other narratives, not as true and false but more like species of bacteria, spreading, competing, mutating, colonizing minds, sometimes helping and sometimes harming. We must understand that those colonized by one or the other narrative are generally unaware, to them it is simply the truth. This meta-narrative brings awareness, and with it some degree of freedom. We can choose our narratives. We can change our narratives. And through this process of awareness, integration, and refinement, all narratives are transformed. This is the beginning of Alignment.

We're bringing back the $100B office hours!

A message for recent YC founders

After seeing the footage of the October 7 atrocities and watching American leftists celebrate with paraglider memes, I can’t overstate how important it is to me for every single Hamas paraglider guy to be killed. I want the activists to know that Israel killed every single one of them.

In 1843, a group of socialist vegans bought a farm in Massachusetts and declared it a transcendentalist utopia. What could go wrong? The Fruitlands commune collapsed within seven months because ideological purity cannot feed human stomachs or organize economic production. Bronson Alcott's experiment banned money, animal products, and apparently common sense while expecting 90 acres to sustain a community through New England winter. Alcott recruited transcendentalist dreamers who had never farmed but possessed strong opinions about spiritual agriculture. They refused animal labor for plowing, rejected manure as fertilizer, and spent harvest season attending philosophy lectures instead of gathering crops. When October arrived, they had planted late, harvested little, and stored almost nothing for winter. Their ideology forbade the market mechanisms that could have saved them. The community's anti-money stance meant no price signals, no profit motive, and no rational allocation of scarce resources. Without property rights, nobody owned responsibility for specific tasks. Without market prices, they couldn't calculate which crops would feed the most people or generate trade value with neighboring farms. Alcott traveled constantly giving speeches while his family and followers faced starvation. By January 1844, members fled to towns where evil capitalism provided food, shelter, and paying work. The commune's collapse wasn't bad luck or poor weather - it was economic law in action. You cannot organize production through wishful thinking and moral lectures. Even the most devoted ideologues eventually choose survival over starvation when reality intervenes. Every socialist experiment faces this identical problem, whether it's 90 acres in Massachusetts or 90 million people in the Soviet Union.

Google was not constrained by the online advertising marketsize when it launched. Uber was not constrained by the taxicab marketsize when it launched. Doordash was not constrained by the food delivery marketsize when it launched. But many journalists and financial analysts are still constrained by their inability to see a future that is different from today.

The Soviet whaling fleet killed 180,000 whales between 1948 and 1973, delivering rotten carcasses that nobody wanted to eat. Soviet citizens had zero demand for whale meat. The ships hunted anyway, fulfilling quotas handed down from central planners who counted tons of dead whale as economic output. This was bureaucratic box-checking that nearly drove multiple whale species to extinction. Soviet whalers targeted endangered right whales and humpbacks specifically because they were larger, helping them hit tonnage targets faster. The meat rotted on deck during long voyages back to port, where officials dutifully recorded the numbers and sent reports to Moscow declaring another successful harvest. Central planners measured success in tons harvested, not consumer satisfaction or long-term sustainability. Factory managers got promoted for exceeding whale quotas, regardless of whether anyone actually wanted whale meat (they didn't). The feedback mechanism that normally connects production to human needs had been severed entirely. When bureaucrats replace market prices with administrative targets, you get mass slaughter with zero purpose. You still see this today every time politicians promise to "create jobs" in industries that lose money year after year. When government agencies measure their success by dollars spent rather than problems solved. When university administrators chase enrollment numbers instead of student outcomes. Remove the profit motive and price signals, and you get 180,000 dead whales rotting in the sun while commissars celebrate meeting their targets. You don't get rational planning. Socialism is fundamentally destructive to the environment and inevitably leads to ecological disasters.

Real product-market fit is customers absorbing risk to use you because the pain is that bad. “We'd need to see more customers first” means you don't have it.

It’s been 50 years since this photo was taken. Palestinian terrorists invaded the Lebanese Christian town of Damour and massacred 582 Christian civilians. It was an apocalypse, said a priest who survived the massacre. “They were coming in thousands, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar! Let us attack them for the Arabs, let us offer a holocaust to Mohammad.’ They were slaughtering everyone, men, women and children.” Men were lined up against the walls of their homes and gunned down. Women were tortured and gang-raped. Babies were shot in the back of the head. Pregnant women had their babies cut out of the womb. Just one of the many massacres committed against Christians by Palestinians. This is how Muslims became the majority in Lebanon.

Announcing fully autonomous AI agents for internal tasks. Hire a general AI agent for IT, compliance, and procurement. Starting at $5/hour. See use cases below.

Now imagine these euro critters being able to scan all your private messages, group chats, AI conversations. They could ensure so much dEmOcrAZy! And launch 100x more criminal prosecutions against insubordinate citizens.

The important thing about Al Gore getting many, many predictions about climate change wrong is that he hasn’t lost one ounce of credibility among major media outlets and they remain completely convinced by what he said

A California mayor just pled guilty to being a literal foreign agent of the Chinese government. She ran a CCP propaganda website disguised as local news. NBC's angle? The real problem is that reporting on it "reignited fears of anti-Asian discrimination." As an Asian American: accurately reporting that a foreign agent infiltrated local government is not anti-Asian. Framing it that way to suppress the story is. Using "anti-Asian bias" as a shield to protect an actual CCP agent from scrutiny is the most anti-Asian thing I can think of. It implies that Chinese Americans are so fragile, or so suspect, that we can't handle the truth about foreign espionage in our own communities. We can handle it. We're the ones most harmed by it. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/b…

And was Catholic.

Those early whole company @Google ski trips were fun! I'm eighth from the left in the top row, wearing the white bathrobe (ninth if you count Susan's baby, Ari)

@M___Morgenstern Not just a dog, a Leonberger!

Dog in the team pic = an infinite money glitch

@paultoo Where are you in this photo?

Don't just start a company Start a cult

As you watch this man be brilliant tonight, I want you to know that he was up at 2:30am last night with our six year old who has the stomach flu. He is our hero and we are so proud of him.

all of their ideas now are like “should we dissolve the government, imprison our opponents, and seize every lever of power in the country? we’re the good guys remember, if we don’t do this the bad guys will win (an election)” like they don’t even talk about healthcare anymore lol

“police arrest man who is bleeding to death because the stabber claimed he was racist” its literally impossible to satirize the UK anymore. even the most extreme, hamfisted memes are just real things that actually happen now