# Dalton & Michael: Elon Musk and the Midwit meme

**Author:** Dalton Caldwell, Michael Seibel
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/IW-dalton-michael-elon-musk-and-the-midwit-meme
**YouTube ID:** IYLVhk7yaaw

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Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel on the midwit meme, how it applies to startups, and the best example: Elon Musk.

## Transcript

this is the the beauty of the midwife meme is the the genius and the idiot come to the same conclusion so what is the idiot approach like that's actually how you can divine the genius approach is you're like what would an idiot do everyone can reach for the idiot approach yeah everyone has the intellectual capacity to reach for the yeah if i didn't know anything this is michael seibel with dalton caldwell today we're going to talk about how overthinking is sometimes a

founder's biggest mistake so dalton this video was triggered by this amazing meme that you made on fundraising advice but before we get to the meme because i think it's like one of the best memes i've ever i've ever seen for fundraising advice let's start in general let's start in general um how can overthinking be bad and when can overthinking be bad yeah i mean i think that what people think being a founder is is what they saw in like

watching the facebook movie or or popular television where you know you're like coding a lot and you know you're making deals and screwing over your friends um just kidding um but but in reality it's a lot of feeling lost and being not sure what to do and feeling stressed out a lot and you're worried all the time and so you tend to overthink everything in every decision you kind of think in circles over and over and over again because you don't have a boss you don't have constraints

when you're a startup founder right there's no one really telling you what to do so you're on your own and so when you the experience of being a startup founder it's to always be overthinking everything in this way there's a bit of an advantage to being young right yeah like you and i experienced this ourselves as founders where we were young when we first started and this is the beauty of not knowing anything the beauty of not knowing anything is that you think everything is easy and none of the innumerable reasons why

something might be hard or your startup might fail even occurs to you you're like oh yeah i'm i'm 22. like everything's easy i can figure this out right and so again this this is like the the midwife meme right where if you don't know anything your approach looks a lot like the approach of people that are really good founders yes and the worst place to be is that you know just enough to know why the things you're trying are hard and the odds are stacked against you and that freaks you out and so you think about it a lot right yes so dalton one

of the most perfect examples of this is actually elon musk and why i think it's so perfect is that depending on how you tell the story elon looks like the dummy or the idiot right like i'm sorry the dummy or the genius right depending on how you tell the story and it almost doesn't matter right because he's winning but you know to me the first example that i always loved is that you know i read some book about the starting of spacex and it started with elon going to russia trying to buy like rockets

and like the russian government being like there's this american billionaire guy who wants to buy rockets and kind of not believing it but elon just looking really serious so they like considered it and like they eventually said no but like he got to talk to people about buying rockets from them he's just a dude with money he was like go to russia buy rockets like that's those are the extremes is that genius or stupid i can't tell i can't tell and and like with tesla itself like to me the

midwit is is electric cars are good that's the extreme electric car is good or on both in the middle it's like no one has successfully done a startup car company since the 50s and every you know if you look at all prior attempts to build an electric car like there's all these words and the infrastructure the electric car is good yeah yes and i think the the one that we find most funny which we'll see this video we'll see if we stand the test of time is is the boring company right drilling holes under the ground so that you can drive places faster

is very clearly the idiot one but like it could be the genius one too it's exactly it's a beginner's mind idea which is like traffic is bad what if we dug a hole under the ground to get to downtown las vegas and what's funny is you read all the critiques of this like the midwest stuff's like well bus systems already exist and it might be much more efficient to optimize uh transportation you know there's lots of words in the middle of that but you know drill tunnel to avoid traffic is certainly at the extremes yeah

and you kind of see him approach all of his problems this way where you can imagine it being the same sort of ideas that we like mars is cool like yeah mars is cool like this is the kind of stuff we come up with as teenagers like all these ideas yes and the the hard work is in the implementation but the idea isn't very complicated and like the v1 is kind of simple-minded and if he was an overthinker he would do he would rule all the stuff out all this stuff is like obviously a bad idea and anyone in the

midwest territory would rule out all these ideas yes right yes and they still do they still do it's you know it's the tesla short seller right let's go through some examples of of the midwife meme and you have to start with the meme that you made for yc founders so just to provide context we're in the part of the batch where yc founders start getting nervous about fundraising whenever a founder gets nervous they start overthinking and whenever they start overthinking they assault us with office hours on

topics and dalton created this meme so that we could fight back what does the meme say yeah what the meme is simple it's the the naive founder is like oh i'm going to raise the amount of money i need to succeed i need i need here's the amount of money i need to raise for my series a i ran a model and it's you know eight hundred thousand dollars so that's what i'm gonna raise that is the like naive approach um the really smart three three time founder someone that's done

this before is like i need to raise 800 000 so i'm going to do it and then the midwife is the one who wants to ask 15 questions and try to construct the perfect round and be afraid that someone they may not have enough allocation for value-added investors and they want to not have a signaling risk they talk a lot about signaling risk and there's like all these factors where i'll be talking to someone and we'll be like 15 levels deep in a hypothetical for an offer that they don't have

right and that's that's the midway man is that like you're screwing yourself by overthinking all this stuff instead of just being like hey i need x dollars i'm gonna raise it i'm gonna get back to work this comes up a lot with mvps one of the questions that i love getting from a founder is before um we launched our mvp how do we know we're going to be able to survive the onslaught of traffic and users that will come on our launch day what what what's what's midwid what's

the midwife play what's the midwife meme for for your mvp i mean yeah the the the two extremes of the midwife meme are launched something fast build something fast and put it out and the minute one is like well i don't want to get a bad reputation that my thing was buggy and we only have one shot to launch and you know like what about the press we got to do a press launch it doesn't have to be an event yeah i don't want people to see my idea

and copy it so it's got to be perfect yes that's one and then do we do do we do like a techcrunch post or is it better to try to get the new york times or like what about hacker news yeah we need to get all three so how do we coordinate them together we want to we want to be featured in the new york times and so how do we optimize for that or oh what should we name the company how about yes i don't yes we have to rebrand because there's a name that's kind of similar to ours we don't want people to be confused how about co-founders i hear this a lot

like i i am a business person and i'm good at sales i need to find a marketing co-founder and an engineer like a cto who's already managed 50 people because we're going to grow fast like how how does co-founder yeah it's like yeah dalton um i'm open to the idea of a co-founder i just haven't found the right person and what i really am looking for is someone with at least five to seven years of experience at google

who made it to at least a level seven and so you know i'm looking i haven't found the right person yet but we're looking for it yes when we find them i'm i'm totally open to bringing out a co-founder when i find that one but first we're gonna raise money and then i think that'll attract a better co-founder yeah yeah so again the point we're kind of making is not that any one of these ideas is the one people say it's that it's thinking in circles and having a thousand different reasons yes that it's the person that should be your co-founder is

no one that you currently know yes yes right and then and let's talk about the other sides of the equation right the the on the dumb side the founders like it's fun to work with my friends so i'm just to say my friend on the smart side justin likes to put a camera on his head you know let's go this is our guy like we were talking about why didn't they pick you as your is their co-founder wasn't it like because i i helped them find an apartment and open there we go this guy this guy helped us find an apartment all

right he's the co-founder of twitch done there you go done and then like those super smart experience founders like oh having co-founders viable for emotional support i know this is going to be tricky and like they have all the like sophisticated reasons same answer same answer i love that okay next this is a classic one especially because you have to deal with so many admissions questions applying to yc dalton what is what is the what is the jedi founder move and to apply to yc versus the midwife

yeah the the extremes of this and the midwife meme are i filled out my application and submitted it like like i applied and the midway founder is like gee i don't know if now is the right time to apply i don't know if we're ready oh i'm gonna i'm gonna write a draft of my application and to send it to 15 people and i'm going to get feedback on my application and i'm going to like you know oh i need an introduction to alumni and i need to talk to alumni and

i need recommendations yeah recommendations from strangers that don't know me i i'm gonna do a lot of research like you see you talk to people that like put months of effort into their application to yc strategy yes not correlated with success and then you talk to people and they're like oh yeah i just like filled it out in 30 minutes and i got in yeah and i spent all that other time working on my

company and to be clear we're not saying do a bad job on your application we're just saying trying to tweak out on this is like something that you can spend tons and tons and tons of time on i'm not sure that's a great allocation of resources no you didn't i think that's like maybe the essential point here is that like we want you to spend time on the important stuff for your startup like we're trying to get you to avoid spending time on the things that won't help you

that's the idea that's the idea all right next and and here's here's kind of a classic one is product market fit dalton do i have product market fit and how what's the midwife approach to yeah the midwife approach for this one is to be not sure if you have it and create 15 different metrics and like a complicated series of thoughts that maybe you have it or you have early product market fit

versus the extremes on this meme earlier we have some islands got earlier the extremes of this are like am i overwhelmed with demand like you know it when you see it like you don't have to think very hard when you have it it's sort of like hits you over the head when you have a product market i think the extremes in the meme is like did i sleep last night it's like i didn't sleep last night do i have time to wonder if i have product market fit that's yes if you have time to wonder about it if you're like gee

do i a product market fit let me let's pontificate on this that probably means you don't yes let's do some let's make some reports so so we talk about all the situations where maybe overthinking is not a good idea but you also describe you know there are certain situations you call them trap door decisions when maybe you want to think a little bit harder than that before making a move so what are some examples of those yeah so um legal issues

don't break any law like saying you didn't know there was a law is not a great legal defense um regulatory issues similarly oh i didn't know that i couldn't launder this money um probably not great you may want to overthink that and look into it um things that affect people's health and well-being yeah you should overthink that you should really spend the time worrying about people right man like let's not be fast and loose if we're building an online pharmacy let's let's

measure twice cut once total and and i think that um what really good founders do is they are very good at figuring out are they dealing with something like that or are they not because even within legal right there's certain things that are like oh this is like whatever and there's certain things that are like really bad michael should i file patents for all of my ip exactly that's a classic overthinking probably not so i think that like

the framework here is really twofold one don't overthink when you don't have to and then two um remember that like most of the work most of the work is not in these overthinking games like most of the work are not in these over-optimizing games yeah it's action action and not thinking right yes yes it's launching it's getting the first customer it's selling it's like it's

doing these things yourself and that's counterintuitive because i think that founders understand that startups are really hard so they assume you need complex strategies to succeed and it's like ah that's a hard thing right it makes sense when i say it right this is hard we would need a complex strategy right how do you respond to that it's like what actual kind of strategy do you need i think if you haven't seen really successful startup companies either personally like where you were

the founder of one or you know people and you saw them go through it yeah it's hard to believe how silly these things are when they start like i think unless you've literally witnessed it personally and you've seen the silly that goes on and like how what it really takes to get big your brain rejects the idea yeah that that's actually how these companies got built you're like no not true it had to be like lots of strategy meetings and white boarding you know

flow charts and you know um gartner magic quadrants of like like like i think you really your brain won't allow you to see that actually here's a nice way to say it is you know the term beginner's mind you want to have a beginner's mind yes that's what the midwife meme is and a beginner's mind is like i guess i'm going to build a product and i'm going to give it to people i guess i'm going to deliver burritos you know that's that's a beginner's mind approach

yeah that's the game and so you might find yourself after watching this video asking yourself what do i need to unlearn yeah how can i have a beginner's mind because again this is this is the the beauty of the midwife meme is the the genius and the idiot come to the same conclusion so what is the idiot approach like that's actually how you can divine the genius approach is you're like what would an idiot do [Laughter] everyone can reach for the idiot approach yeah everyone has the

intellectual capacity to reach for the yeah if i didn't know anything so with all that being said um have fun and don't overthink it too much don't overthink it too much and make sure that you have a little bit of something in your head that's asking yourself is this the thing that's really important if not i can move on if not i can move on all right thanks much alton thanks
