But ignoring those details won’t work — not in the long run, says Y Combinator’s president from 2014 to 2019, Sam Altman. An acolyte of Paul Graham’s, Sam adhered to the core Y Combinator dictum: It’s better to have one hundred users who love you than a million users who just kind of like you. It’s counterintuitive. You may be thinking If a million people “kind of like” my product enough to buy it, isn’t that better for business than a hundred obsessive oddballs? To which Sam would say…definitely not.
In public market investing, as in many things, you achieve big success when you’re both contrarian and right.
Warren Buffett has a mantra: “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
