In 2014 I read a @paulg essay, centered on two words, that totally cracked my mind. It pulled me out of depression and gave me hope that one day I’d be one of those founders or investors at YC demo day.

It took a decade, and those two words on repeat, but last Wednesday I stood ded by the founders and investors I once dreamed of joining.

No longer "an imposter"
No longer "an outsider"
Just "Britton - big YC fan, former (non YC) founder, small check investor, and big tech champion for startups"

I felt peace for a moment, excitement for the future too.

Then another thought entered: How? How the hell did I manage to get here?

This isn’t a “here’s how I did it and you can do it to” kinda post though. You’re not me, our circumstances are not the same, but I'm still gonna click "Post".

So here’s my “too long to read” essay sharing how it started, what Paul wrote, and a bit of "So what?" for you to explore and maybe even inspire you to keep pushing.

———————
How F**ked was I?

I was really down, badly down.

I dropped out of college in 2013 to marry Elle, grow our Bitcoin, and “learn entrepreneurship” from the best mentor I had met at school (by working at his company).

I gave myself 3 years to start a company. I was convinced between the internet, bitcoin, and this job opportunity we’d succeed. The path looked hard but not impossible if we were willing to sacrifice.

Elle and I decided to go for it. We left Alaska, went to Utah, and lived in a room in my grandparents house to save money so I could become an entrepreneur.

8 months into that journey MtGox bitcoin trading exchange collapsed. I was devastated.

My credit was leveraged to the tits and my savings was wiped out completely. The BTC nest egg I had planned to turn into a future of abundance.... was snatched from me. The “low pay high experience” job felt like a prison with no offramp to my own path. In-job bureaucracy that felt impossible to conquer. I failed and no one I knew IRL even understood why...

I was crushed into catatonic haplessness and became depressed. Elle was a saint. Literally pulled me out of bed for a month. She woke up early, made breakfast, would bring me my meds, remind me to eat, put up with my disempowered video game binges, cut my hair, clipped my fingernails, drove me to work. And the hardest thing… she was patient. (I love you Elle.)

————————————
Paul’s Words:

A month went by and Elle and I got in an argument because I’d been spending too much time playing video games. I played because I was depressed and became more depressed because I played.

After the fight I was scrolling twitter. Mad. Mad at life. Mad at the universe. Mad at Mark Karpeles, and somewhere in the tech adjacent bowels of early Bitcoin twitter I came across an essay by Paul Graham. “RELENTLESSLY RESOURCEFUL”

Those were the words. I read them and decided “Yep. That’s me. Or it’s gonna be me.”

So I started being more relentless and more resourceful. And tried to get better at doing more of both frequently.

Deciding to be relentlessly resourceful was a one time choice.

Becoming consistent was the battle. But it was the future I wanted, and I needed to become consistently relentlessly resourceful. So I started working on it.

It hurt. It was hard, it was scary, it took way longer than I wanted and I’m really fucking happy I did it.

I’m not gonna bore you with my entire life story, but I will bore you with this list for me to revisit in the future and maybe you can grab something off it and use it to make yourself more relentlessly resourceful:
(or not if you're hapless)
- I went to every event I could and talked to every person. I was the first one to arrive and the last one to leave.
- People thought I was useless or annoying. So I learned to make friends and be formidably skilled.
- I asked people to be friends, I helped others, and I worked and cared hard.
- I learned to feel out those who were relentlessly resourceful like me vs those who weren’t.
- I launched and failed a startup… a few times (after so many false starts) and learned it’s really hard to predict who’s actually RR vs those who talk like they are.
- Got rejected by YC.
- Disappointed my cofounders by giving up.
- Started a family, bought a house, with Elle after reproductive “launch and failures”.
- I fixed skill & personality issues, with hard work.
- I learned to ask for help, to ask for money, to ask for advice.
- I learned to program, believed in AI, learned to cold email, and abandoned zero sum thinking.
- I worked my ass off, felt like an imposter, hung in there.

YOU CAN TOO. Pick 2 things that sound stupid from the list and try them.

————————————
So What? What now?

I can't tell you what will work for you. But if you feel discouraged or blocked Paul's essay is a good place to start.

This post is to share what made me, Me.
Go figure out what will make you, you.

But I will tell you my biggest learning, my real secret sauce: I’ve learned to compound relentless resourcefulness. I’ve obsessively sought out and helped the relentlessly resourceful people I meet along the way, surrounded myself with the most relentlessly resourceful customers, colleagues, and friends and got the reps in necessary to hone my ability to attract, identify, inspire, teach and empower more relentlessly successful people while developing two attributes many of them don’t possess: long term patience and an appetite for sharing the glory.

Paul says in the essay “Being relentlessly resourceful is definitely not the recipe for success in big companies... I don't even want to think what the recipe is in big companies, but it is certainly longer and messier, involving some combination of resourcefulness, obedience, and building alliances.”

I've been "cooking" this "big company recipe" with my secret sauce for 4 years now. I haven’t figured all of it out yet. But there’s increasing appetite for the relentlessly resourceful in big tech companies if you find the right leaders to align with (cough *satya*), can outlast the bureaucracy, tactfully use disobedience, can see the right outcome and above all else, find the right customers & timing to deliver results with clarity and energy.

————————————
Damn. You read this rambling? Thank you.

Maybe all of this is just a long way of explaining why I'm a YC fan. Maybe it's just longwinded way of saying Thank you @paulg publicly. Maybe I'm trying to convince founders to find a real incredible kick ass ride-or-die spouse like Elle and prioritize having kids. Let me know if you figure it out.

I think it's mostly a bat signal that if you're relentlessly resourceful, we should maybe be friends. Because I'm not stopping. :)

paulgraham.com/relres.html

i just hope we don't regret making ai open source.

the rapid increase in CVEs will overwhelm the financial incentive structures that drove responsible disclosure.

what remains? an accelerated descent towards disclosure for clout or exploitation followed by an innumerable number of breaches and endless class action lawsuits.

fuck the evil game companies.

Y2K aint got shit on the week of Halloween 2026.

NOT TAILSCALE ! NOOOOO!

mogged 😜

it’s real

GPU depreciation is a myth

this is honestly insane.
nearly 1/4 million words since June.

never thought I’d yap at my computer more than I type on it.

thx @aquavoice

hey @chamath and @DavidSacks you could do the funniest thing rn 😉

not if Warca can help it

never seen cows or dogs go extinct

let’s fucking go

(@Jason)

i can't stop thinking about that little bee singing about kfc and pigeons

normies have no clue that their TVs are spying on them and that AI stole their medical labs data

there’s no way they can comprehend the pwnage that is upon us.

i can't wait till @bot shames people because it hears their smoke alarm do the battery chirp.

today my son needed an auto-clicker for an online game where he has to click a cookie.

first he tried to download one

i was like, “no way in hell am i giving that thing accessibility permissions.”

app on the Apple Store? $2.99

so we vibe coded one with claude in two minutes.

this may be hard to believe, but i am not a generational shitpoaster. in fact, i am just a dude, a dude who tries to tweet the way his friends tweet.

(my friends just all happen to be generational shitpoasters)

my favorite part of twitter is when it feels like you're just hanging out asynchronously with all your friends on a saturday night.

this is incredible, but also i'm still skeptical. i need at least a million more people to try and do this.