Einar Volsett

Actually, I was at the first or the second MicroConf.

So after Remail and the whole thing, I was a little burnt out by Silicon Valley, to be honest with you.

And people try to get me to sort of say... I had a really good friend of mine, still a good friend of mine, who was like, dude, what are you doing?

Why don't you just start a mobile social network app and I'll get one of my friends to buy it?

I was like, this is not how Silicon Valley works.

Yeah, yeah.

I was like, yeah, I know that's how it worked.

And it probably actually would have worked out pretty well.

But I just wasn't interested.

And so Rob was really one of the first people who did this, who had this notion that there was sort of a different way to do startups that wasn't just like...

let's raise a shit ton of money let's they're sort of levered for growth right it's like they raise as much money as we can as quickly as we can and in order to grow as much as we can and like let's not let's forget about you know profits or sustainability or really anything it's just the only thing that that matters is growth um and like you basically have to be fundraising every 18 months in order to to make that model work and he was one of the first people he was like you don't have to do that like you could

And it's sort of actually, to me at least, sort of a similar feeling to like PG's old essays in the sense that it's like, oh, so open your eyes.

So like you can have, you know, a sustainable, calm software business that's throwing off cash.

Like that's something that you can build without necessarily having to go ask permission from Silicon Valley VCs in order to do it.

Because fundamentally, that's what you need to do.

If you're going to raise money and do a traditional Silicon Valley VC type thing, you need the permission of the people with the money to do it.

TinySeed basically provides capital for companies that are like that.

And so what we saw was, so the way to think about it, if you know YC, is like YC effectively filled a pretty big hole in like a five or six, along with a couple of other players, like first-round capital.

And so what they did was they said, you know what?

And people don't remember this, but like YC gave very little amounts of money initially.