What I learned in 2016

2016 has been an incredible year for Scale, a company I started in June. We’re helping amazing companies like Uber, Alphabet, Houzz, and P&G with our API for human intelligence. Our mission to bring human intelligence to software applications aligns with what Eric Schmidt believes will shape the next $100B company, and more importantly activate one of the greatest technological shift of our time. I sent my last investor update with a sense of disbelief that Scale was the same company we started back in June.

When reflecting on my year, I felt defined by two things: adopting a risk-seeking mentality and doing a lot of hard work. I’ve gained a little perspective on the importance of both, and wanted to reflect on my experiences before the new year.

While we were fundraising for Scale, one VC asked me:

When did you know you wanted to start a startup? The past few years of your life seem perfectly lined up to start your own startup.

I remember being caught off guard, and rattled off some silly answer about being inspired by The Social Network.

The earliest I can remember wanting to start a company was when I was in 9th grade. My friend and I started a Google Doc of startup ideas to do when we were old enough. It contains gems like “superpopular app. any ideas?”, “iTunes replacement (I swear it always freezes)”, and “actually nvm spotify is pretty dope”.

However, I haven’t lived the past few years with the sole goal of starting a startup. Instead, I’ve relentlessly pursued opportunities any I found exciting, consuming, and time-sensitive. Put more simply, I’ve been minimizing my regret, an important concept in decision theory and machine learning.

In December 2015 while a freshman at MIT, I was interviewing everywhere, perhaps indiscriminately, for engineering and machine learning opportunities which excited me, from Deepmind and Snapchat Research to Opendoor and Stripe. On one hand, these opportunities really excited me. But at the same time, I felt aimless and a little lost—I was waiting for one of these offers to feel irrefusable, but it really felt like I was going to go work at yet another tech company. Having already worked at a few mid-stage startups after high school, it didn’t feel like a growth opportunity for myself.

While discussing my offer with Eric Wu, Opendoor’s CEO, he offered an insight that really struck me. It went something like this:

Think about it this way. As you get older, you’re only going to become more and more risk-averse. You’ll get married, buy a house, have kids, etc.

That means today, you’re the most risk-seeking you’ll ever be.  So, if there’s a risk today that you aren’t willing to take, then you might never end up taking that risk.

At the time, he was trying to persuade me against larger companies like Stripe or Dropbox in favor of a smaller company like his own Opendoor (which at the time was around 30 people). But overall, it persuaded me against accepting any offers at all.

Instead, the conversation convinced me that I needed to try to start a company. Not only would it be a great growth opportunity, I knew I would regret it if I never took the risk to be an entrepreneur at the perfect time.

I knew I would also regret not accepting some of the offers I received; Snapchat and Opendoor are doing particularly well today. There are obviously so many opportunities in technology, and the outcomes have such high variance, that it‘s nearly impossible to not regret some of your choices. However, I believe that if you don’t have opportunities you regret not taking, you aren’t chasing after enough opportunities.

That was the start of my journey that leads to me founding Scale. In January, while I was working as at Hudson River Trading, a high-frequency trading firm, I began hacking on side projects. I went through a couple ideas over the next few months, consistently learning and iterating. When I finally landed on Scale, it felt like magic. The response from our Product Hunt launch and TechCrunch article was incredibly positive, and we’ve been growing rapidly ever since.

Over the summer, we were a part of the Y Combinator (YC), a startup accelerator known for producing great companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe. Something the YC partners tell you at the beginning of the program is that you should always be working extremely hard. Your time during YC is very highly leveraged—progress made during the summer directly translates into easier fundraising at Demo Day, which might be the single best fundraising environment out there. Paul Buchheit, one of the YC partners, even said that many consider YC the most productive time of their lives.

I had already concluded before YC that the amount I learned grew super-linearly with how hard I worked. That is, there’s an economies of scale effect with how hard I worked. After my first few months of working 12-hour days at Quora, I remember being really surprised at how much I’d improved as an engineer. It felt like I went from a code monkey to a legitimate system architect in just a few months, even though I had been coding for years beforehand.

Looking back on the year, it still rings true. For the first third of the year while I was still a student at MIT, I was juggling 5 graduate computer science courses, along with the side projects I was working on, which consumed most of my attention. I didn’t take any breaks—I spent my spring break building the iOS app for Ava, a precursor to Scale, and flew out to SF right after finals to work on it. I remember thinking many times throughout that semester that I was working harder than at any other point in my life.

I felt the exact same way during YC. It turns out that if you have a lot of momentum, it’s not too difficult to keep grinding even further. In one of Paul Graham’s essays, he says one of the tricks to surviving startups is to not stop to think about how tired you are. After a full year of 80–100 hour weeks, I feel like I must have employed that trick.

Generating a lot of ideas is another great motivator for hard work. Oftentimes, makers will find themselves in situations where the rate at which they get ideas greatly exceeds the rate at which they can build them. Even better is when the rate of good ideas exceeds the rate at which they can build them. At this point, time becomes the enemy, and you begin craving 100 hour weeks. The higher your execution speed, the more you’re able to keep up with the flood of ideas.

This flooding (and sometimes wastage) of ideas is one of the reasons why moving fast is so important for startups. The return on investment on most ideas in startups is distributed roughly according to a power-law distribution (similarly to startup outcomes themselves). There are a few ideas, like Snapchat Stories or Facebook News Feed, whose return will greatly overshadow the other ideas. Prioritization seeks to identify these ideas with outsized returns as best as possible, but it’s impossible to prioritize perfectly. To prevent a diamond idea from being passed over, startups need to compress each idea to an minimum viable product (MVP) as much as possible, and focus on fast execution speed.

That’s why we focus on moving fast at Scale—it’s something that the whole team and I have truly internalized. I’m immensely proud of our team for continuing to ship feature after feature after feature after feature, and it bodes incredibly well for everything we’ll do at Scale in the future. Hard work consistently seems to trump other factors.

Ultimately, 2016 might go down as the year I personally worked the hardest. Although, I surely hope not—it’s an incredible feeling to be in the midst of the most productive time of your life so far.

By the way, we’re hiring for engineers and operations! Feel free to apply online, or simply email hello[at]scaleapi.com.

Thank you to Leigh Marie Braswell and Jenny Wang for reading earlier drafts.