Jon Xu
speaker
124 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 17 Jun
Jon Xu’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I often meet founders who have lots of ideas about what to work on and can't decide between them.
Sometimes they're working on multiple things.
Often they'll say that they're waiting to find the best idea before fully committing.
don't overthink it.
Overthinking a startup in the earliest days can take many forms, but here are a couple of the most common failure modes I see.
The first is thinking that you need to find the perfect idea.
In some ways, this is an understandable impulse.
Startups are hard, so shouldn't you figure out the best idea before committing?
The problem with this approach is that it's impossible to figure out the perfect idea in the abstract.
You can only figure out what you should be working on by making contact with reality and getting feedback from customers.
The second overthink is, am I the perfect founder for this?
It's true that founder market fit matters.
A non-technical founder likely won't be the right person to come up with a killer DevTools startup idea, for example.
But often founders, especially second time founders, weaponize this line against themselves.
They convince themselves that they need a decade of domain experience before they can start.
The truth is, you don't.
If you pick an idea you're curious about, go extremely deep,
and most importantly, talk to customers, it's often possible to develop extraordinary knowledge in a short amount of time.
We see incredible examples of this all the time at YC.
Take Blake Scholl, the CEO of Boom Supersonic.
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