A few people have asked me why I write about startups. Why spend time on looking into startups. Fair question. Here's the honest answer.
Initially, whenever I got free time I used to look into YC or a16z startups to find traits that get them into these accelerators, because one day I want to get into YC or a16z. That's how it started. Pure curiosity mixed with ambition. I wanted to reverse-engineer what "getting in" actually looks like from the outside.
Curiosity is the real reason
I'm genuinely curious about how founders are solving problems. When I come across a new startup, my brain just wants to know. What's broken in the world that made them start this? Why now? Why them? Why hasn't anyone else fixed it? That curiosity is what pulls me in. Not the hype, not the funding rounds, the actual problem.
Most of the time, the interesting stuff isn't in the pitch deck. It's buried a few layers deeper. You have to dig.
It takes hours, not minutes
Reading a TechCrunch article takes 2 minutes. Actually understanding a startup takes at least 3 hours. Sometimes more.
You have to look at what problem they're solving. Is it a real problem or something they invented to justify the company? Who are the competitors? How are the incumbents currently handling this, and why is that broken? What impact are they actually making, how many customers, what's the retention, are people sticking around? What does their market look like in 5 years?
You can't answer any of that by skimming their homepage. You have to sit with it. Read the articles, watch the founder interviews, try the product if you can, think about who you know that would actually buy this.
By the end of those 3 hours, you either understand why the company exists or you realize you don't, and usually that tells you something too.
Your product skill develops
The more startups I look into, the sharper my product thinking gets. You start noticing why certain product decisions work and others don't. Why this onboarding flow converts and that one doesn't. Why this pricing page feels honest and another feels like a trap. Why one founder picked a wedge and another tried to boil the ocean.
You can't learn this from a book. You learn it by looking at hundreds of products and asking why each choice was made. Over time, you stop asking "is this good" and start asking "why did they do it this way, and what would I do differently." That's the shift.
You start understanding founders
The more I look, the more I understand what founders actually go through. The decisions they make under constraints. Why they pivot. Why they ignore certain feedback. Why a seemingly obvious feature takes a year to ship. Why they pick certain investors over others. Why some persist through the graveyard years and others tap out.
You pick up on the patterns. The kind of people who make it. The traits that show up over and over. The red flags. It's not a formula, but after a while, you can read a founder's story and get a rough sense of where it's going.
Writing is how I know what I think
I don't fully know what I think about a startup until I've tried to put it on a page. Writing forces the thinking. You can't hide behind "interesting company" when you have to explain why. Every time I sit down to write, I realize I understood half as much as I thought I did.
Pattern recognition
The more I look at, the more I notice patterns. Why certain models work. Why some products feel obvious in hindsight. Why "brilliant ideas" die in six months. You can't shortcut this. You have to look at enough examples to start seeing the shape of what works.
I'm not smart enough to predict which startups will make it. Nobody is. But the more I study them, the better my gut gets.
It keeps me hungry
Reading about founders who are going for something big, who are in the trenches, who raised $47M to fix an industry nobody talks about, it reminds me why any of this matters. These people are out there swinging. I should be too.
Why you might want to try it
Pick a startup. Spend 3 hours actually understanding it. Write a few hundred words on the problem, the competitors, the impact. Do it once a week.
Your thinking will sharpen. Your taste will develop. And somewhere along the way, you'll find the kind of problem you actually want to work on.
That's why I do this. It's selfish. It makes me better at what I care about. If someone else gets something from it, that's a bonus.
PS: written with help of AI cause I am not a Shakespeare