RO Letters #10

Hello,

Last month, I wrote about “shedding my GenZ-ness”.

I explained how the RO goes against what many media founders of my generation seem to think is the “new” way of doing media (social media-first, visual, engaging, snappy). Not all of course, but you get me.

On the contrary, the RO doubles down on written, long-form, sober formats. I recently finished reading the biography of Hubert Beuve-Méry, founder of France’s marquee newspaper “Le Monde”. One of his famous quips was “faites chiant”, loosely translated as “make it boring”.

Applied to the RO, this means the quality of the writing and the exclusivity of the reported facts take precedence over everything else. RO subscribers pay us to be informed, not entertained. We just published our first RO Long Read (on the links between Japanese capital and the African startup scene). That type of article is our direction of travel.

This month, I’d like to write about “shedding my YC-ness”.

YC’s videos and the writings of its apparatchiks molded my young founder's brain. Before I dive into my disagreements, let me clarify: YC’s writings give founders boundless confidence as to what they can achieve. This is incredibly potent. After moving back to France (from California), I realized many of my friends had not ingrained the limitless mental possibilities of being YC-pilled grants you.

Taking the RO’s vision so ridiculously seriously from day 1 is a byproduct of YC’s teachings. The downstream effect of that extreme self-belief is that an Ivy League university bought an RO subscription barely a few years after we started. YC imbues founders with the intoxicating belief that the world is malleable and that their vision can, objectively, become reality. The intoxication compounds when you start realizing YC is right.

I now feel like I’m exiting my “founder adolescence”. The RO has a full-time employee that isn’t myself. We have a vacation and a paternity leave policy. We pay taxes and provide health insurance. We make real money. We have investors. And as the RO matures, I as a founder am gradually unmooring myself from the YC ethos.

Obviously, YC has invested in so many companies, professed so many things that defining a “consolidated” YC ethos is futile. Some of the points I’ll make below may have been contradicted by a YC-affiliated person. All in all, I believe my points to be broadly fair.

Point 1: focus on speed of growth.

A famous YC injunction is to grow users or revenue as quickly as possible. As we approach PMF, this starts to make less sense to me. A Mexican founder I interviewed for an upcoming article said this:

“The first startup I founded (the YC-backed, co-living one) wasn’t mature. Our focus was pure velocity, assuming we’d figure out structure later.

Now, I think much more about sequencing. What has to be true before we scale something? What foundation needs to be in place so that growth compounds rather than creates fragility?

I’m also more conscious about building systems instead of reacting to opportunities. That applies to hiring, product development, and even geographic expansion. We don’t grow for the sake of growth, we grow once the underlying unit works.”

For the next few years, the RO has two ICPs: VCs with emerging market exposure and MBA programs. These are the people who have proven they’ll buy RO subscriptions, renew, and derive value from us. These two ICPs represent sufficiently large markets. Once we saturate them, we’ll expand. But for now, we aren’t entertaining any other ICP. Even if they “seem potentially” interested in the RO and signing them could “help us grow revenue”.

On the growth side, we’re privileging long-term, strategic plays like the RO Ambassador program rather than aggressive hyper-scaling. I aim for so-called “human-led growth”. In other words, fostering quality, two-way relationships with exceptional people who can help grow the RO in their localities. I don’t really care about optimizing and A/B testing our LinkedIn hooks or gorging on Google Ads.

The human-led growth approach is longer, messier, but much more enjoyable and more commercially-viable in the long-term, I believe.

Point 2: lack of intellectual, holistic reflection.

YC’s focus on user/revenue growth seems to be the end-all-be-all for its companies. YC videos teach you how to sell, but rarely do I see them pushing founders to reflect on what they’re selling.

What are the second-order societal effects of your product? Does it make society more harmonious? Does it increase human well-being? What’s the non-commercial reason you’re doing this?

I’m currently reading Careless People, an insider account of Facebook’s whirlwind early scaling years. The author explains how Zuckerberg had a professed disdain for politics, placing engineering on a pedestal despite his product arguably being this century’s most powerful political tool. This blatant lack of philosophical, non-business, intellectual depth is appalling in the hyper-scaling AI founders (Anthropic’s recent conflict with the US government is a welcome exception).

In Silicon Valley, Zuckerberg is supposedly the paragon of a “successful” founder because of his company’s sheer commercial scale. I don’t want that to be the RO’s leading success indicator.

I want the RO team to think hard and deeply about the articles we put out. What points are we trying to prove? Have we gone deep enough? Do we take into account the perspectives of all the people in the story?

Journalism disguised as market research (credits to Paul for coming up with this) is an apt description of the RO. The market research element allows us to sell subscriptions, and the journalism element allows us to uncover and scrutinize important information.

The RO exists to make sure the potential of the global startup scene is attained and societally desirable. We happen to need a strong business model to support that ambition, which we’re building in parallel. But the RO’s revenue is merely the fuel for its original mission, not its entire raison d’être.

This points to a crucial difference between the American and European startup scene (we have an RO Long Read coming up on that). This talk (in French) by Mistral’s co-founder Arthur Mensch explains the philosophical difference between the European versus the American approach to AI. As a European founder, I concur.

Wrapping up this point: YC places revenue generation as the definition of whether you’ve made something “people want” or not. That’s intellectually thin. Tobacco companies made something “people wanted”. We have more profound ambitions to make something “society benefits from”. That’s subjective and perilous to define, but a more exciting goal.

Broader RO updates

This is meant to be an investor update, so dropping some important milestones the RO hit last month:

Please feel free to respond to this email with any comments, thoughts, feedback, criticism.

Tim