Naming Convention
My naming convention is a nod to YC’s User Manual. Acknowledging YC’s User Manual here feels like nodding in respect to an old friend.
Today, YC’s User Manual has been integrated into Bookface and expanded into its Knowledge Base. It’s one feature - advice - of an enormous platform of resources that YC founders have access to.
When I joined YC in 2015, Bookface hadn’t been launched yet - there wasn’t a “software team” dedicated to building things for founders or YC staff. The User Manual I was introduced to was an infinite-scroll, single-spaced page in Hacker News’ backend that PG had built in Lisp. (Founders literally had to log into Hacker News to access it. And founders also had to log into Hacker News to book office hours using a tool called the “booker.” These tools - plus email lists I moderated on Google Groups for each batch - were Bookface’s MVP)
The User Manual was a collection of PG’s private advice to newly-funded founders orienting them to YC. We encouraged founders to read it before they did anything else, and to refer to it at various moments in the batch schedule, like Prototype Day and Demo Day. The User Manual was long enough then that it took founders a little over an hour of focused time to read.
No one at YC owned updates to The User Manual. I don’t think anyone was really aware of how it described the batch’s events or PG’s expectations and advice around them. Back then, YC was too loosely organized for any one person to have overview of the founder’s experience of it - that’s what I was hired for. Since my job was to own the batch, and the UM was the only quasi-orientation document we sent to founders after funding them, that meant it became my job to iterate the The User Manual as YC evolved. I didn’t think twice about what it meant that YC’s newest hire - and a newcomer to tech - was editing PG’s original writings. I didn’t have time to.
In addition to adding new sections to The User Manual as the batches evolved, and updating PG’s advice over time as YC’s advice shifted (on the important points, very little), at some point I wrote a section with resources to help founders manage their psychology. I suppose this was the first time YC defined its position on the mental health of the founders it funded: “Consider it. And get support when you need it.”
This User Manual for Founder Psychology feels like a continuation of the UM that I inherited and lovingly expanded at YC nearly a decade ago. I think of my User Manual as a specialized companion guide to YC’s: The content in this Manual will help you scale yourself, so you can follow all the good advice in YC’s User Manual, and scale your startup.
Batching advice in The User Manual saved PG from repeating the same advice to founders over and over again. Because founders experience the same psychological challenges as their startups grow, The User Manual for Founder Psychology saves me from doing the same.
