Do Things That Don't Scale

Y Combinator's advice: do things that don't scale. So you're supposed to manually onboard every user yourself. Like, hi Bob, welcome! Let me walk you through clicking this button. I will now spend four hours with you. Scaling? Never heard of her.

It's like raising kids. My son asked me to tie his shoes yesterday. I said, "You know what? I've done this ten thousand times. I'm done." He left the house with flip-flops in January. Terrible parenting? Maybe. But my back appreciated it.

The real move is sitting down at dinner with your kid while they're six—watching them eat spaghetti like a drunk raccoon—and thinking, "I could automate this." You can't. You just sit there. You watch them flick a noodle across the room. That's the job.

Everyone wants the million-dollar idea. Nobody wants to tie shoes for the millionth time. But that's where the magic lives. Not in efficiency. In being there. In actually understanding your kid. Or your user. Or literally anyone.

Do the unscalable thing. Be present. Stop optimizing. Just show up.