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Therapy is mostly offered by psychologists or social workers. I'm pretty highly educated and can really fight back, so I choose a psychologist who had a PhD. I found I could relate better to her on that level. That's sort of elitist of me, but it worked.

A therapist primarily talks to you. Teaches you coping mechanisms. Works with you to understand yourself over time -- usually sessions every week. They often work in conjunction with a psychiatrist, who is a medical doctor who can give you prescriptions. Most people, or I think most, do both -- drugs and talk therapy combined I think have proven to be the most effective through clinical studies.

I did not want to take any drugs though. That has to do partially with my own family's history of addiction but also the uncertainty in the science around the drugs. SSRIs are particularly scary to me. My Dad is a research psychologist (he has a PhD in psychology but is not a clinician) and I was very scared of those drugs, how hard they are to get off, etc. I choose to to intensive talk therapy without the drugs, which is very hard, I think, but worked for me. The human brain is very complicated and questions about the long-term effects are mostly unanswered. I didn't want to be taking an anti-depressant for the rest of my life.

As for how to find a psychologist, I always tell friends that they should go shopping. You really need to jive with the person. You need to be willing to tell them your life story and to think that you could speak with them week after week. In the two times in my life that I have had to find therapists, I've gone to five or six and basically told them about myself. From that -- which isn't so much an interview as it is a practice session -- I've chosen the one I want to work with. This can be a real pain in the ass, as you're wasting insured sessions, but I think it's worthwhile.

The practical reality of finding that list of five people: once I just asked some friends and another time I just used my insurer's database.

I have been participating in a Stanford Medical research study since October. The name of the randomized control study is "One Diet Does Not Fit All" (http://nutrition.stanford.edu/projects/DietbyGenotype-Study....). The basic premise of the study is that as almost everyone has one of two insulin responses to glucose and that if you have one response, you should be on a low-fat diet, and if you have the other, you should be on low-carb.

My personal results have been quite successful. I was randomly assigned to the low-carb diet. I basically eat vegetables, meats, and cheese. I avoid everything from bread, to rice, to even nuts and fruits. On this diet I have lost nearly fifty pounds since I started. So it's been pretty successful for me. (I will admit that I had no idea whether it's the particular diet I'm on, per se, or the fact that I'm on any diet at all -- that I am paying attention).

I also accept the premise of the study: one diet does not fit everyone. Sometimes I meet people and they say it's as simple as calories in, calories out. Some people say everyone should be on this diet or that diet. I don't know -- I don't presume that my diet would simply work for everyone. The human body is a very complex system both for any one person, and for the population. I tend to believe the central premise of the study (and we'll see if it works out): that different physiologies lead to different beneficial diets (and perhaps much more).

There is a lot of story here: exercise being easier, meetings going more smoothly, my colleagues and family and friends supporting me, YC giving me a new t-shirt, buying a new wardrobe, my changing interactions with women (I'm strait, and who knows if this is due to me looking better or me being more confident)...etc...I'm planning to write up a (as is often the case) too-long blog post on it all when I'm finished with the study on October.

It actually depends on whether you're in a card-present or card-not-present situation. For historical (i.e. irrational) reasons, merchants are responsible for fraud in the CNP situation.

Great batchmates building a great company. Many congratulations to John, James, Andrew, Nate and the whole team.

I don't want to draw out a tenuous claim: but in some ways most tech companies (and particularly early-stage startups) are more like cooperatives than has historically been the case in corporations. As Sam Altman's recent article on employee equity points to, being liberal with ownership is considered a virtue in technology companies. Long-gone are the days where you can build a technology company and keep all the ownership closely held (I'm sure there are other examples, but Bloomberg LP would be a prototypical example).

Basically we sign long contracts that don't have many outs. (We also put our code in code escrow). In this way, even if we were bought by Bank 1, they would be obligated to serve the contract of Bank 2. In essence, the moment we signed one long-term deal, we became unacquirable to other FIs and are left with folks like First Data, FIS, Fiserv. Basically, we aren't selling.

Ya :). Most of my writing to date hasn't been about ST, per se, but this was my first trial. Sorry that if it is too marketing-y.

They did solve a real problem. They just tried to run a business organization more like a high-margin software business rather than a low-margin commodity business, which is what they are right now.

They can change that but they haven't yet.

Put another way, don't solve a problem if the cost to solve it is greater than solving it pays you.

That simple sentiment might be why working for them was so cool and why, as just one proof point, PC is now a part-time partner at YC.

Sure. I'd agree with that I guess. The counterfactual theory is that YC has something to tell you -- but that suggests there is something to improve per se. But that's not quite right. It's not that you did something wrong it's that you didn't have quite the elements to be right.

While I was in college, I was put on a committee to choose a new Director of Admissions. One of the internal candidates said during his interview: "There is a good reason that everyone who is accepted gets in, but there is not a good reason why people are rejected."

It many ways that seems obvious. To get in you have to have something going for you. To not get in you don't have to do anything wrong, you just have to not have a thing that does get you in. It would be just as hard for my college to write high school seniors a letter saying, well, you were 2nd in your class and had a 1500 but noting stood out as would be for YC to write people direct feedback at scale. What would it really mean? How do you action that? No special sauce isn't really feedback. You can't point to anything wrong other than you can't point to anything great.

This has proven true for me in the admissions processes I've gone through on the other side: whether at a consulting firm, or Stripe, or Standard Treasury, or Echoing Green (I read semi-finalist apps). Most people self-select to apply for good and just reasons but some people really excite you and some people don't. Some people just have that something special, and the people who don't don't really have anything wrong with them.

So to me this commentary rings true and is honestly put.

I don't know Elizabeth (sure she's great), but the other three are amazing and always quite helpful.

Kat's been an amazing connector both within the YC community and in supporting applicants. She's connected me with some potential fintech applicants, which I think is a great way to leverage alums.

We met with Yuri a few times before he was a part-time partner and he was quite helpful and encouraging. We're in the enterprise space and he told us to just keep fighting the long-sales-cycle fight. That advice came at a critical moment where we really needed to just keep going through the slog.

I haven't talked to PC much since leaving Stripe but he obviously build a great company and culture there that I really enjoyed. He's going to be an amazing resource for YC companies.

Oh ya, that's my mistake. I was right when I called it "net income" but then didn't do the net in the actual math! I'll leave it unedited so your comment makes sense though.

It was a turn of phrase -- sorry if I offended.

As to the usefulness and worthwhileness of YC there cannot be two opinions. The affection and praise of the alumni alone would prove the point even before you consider the companies that have built out of it. And at the heart of that is what Walker points to quite clearly: candor and the clear support that can only spring from it.

Venture funds are "General Partners" that manage a pool of capital on behalf of "Limited Partners" or LPs. Limited partners in a fund this size are usually pension funds (CalPERS), university and not-for-profit endowments (Harvard, Brown, MacArthur Foundation), and maybe high-net-worth individuals.

So A16Z raises commitments of 1.5B from all of these people who have a lot of money that they want to grow. Those people deploy their capital to VC, to Hedge/PE funds, to timber, to public markets, to bonds, etc.

A16Z aren't actually given a pile of cash though, instead A16Z does capital calls on an as-needed basis. Then A16Z deploys that capital to startups and other companies over the life of the fund (often ten years with some extensions).

Most venture funds operate on something like a "two and twenty model" meaning that every year they get 2% of the funds value for operating expenses. In A16Z they have a huge staff of designers, recruiters, BD experts, etc, that help their startups. The 2% goes toward things like that.

The 20% is carry, which is earned as a percentage of net income. So let's say that A16Z invests 5M in a company on a 10M pre-money valuation. A16Z owns 1/3 of the company. The company sells for $30M the next day to Facebook. A16Z now has $10M dollars. They take $2M of that for themselves and then they distribute back to the LPs the other $8M.

(This is lacking a lot of nuance like side funds, but I hope it's helpful).

I'm frequently trying to explain to people that Stripe has all the features to run one's marketplace on but folks somehow think that they should be using another product merely because of the marketing. Good to have a centralized marketing experience targeted toward marketplaces, even if the feature set didn't change. It is very smart -- PC and the whole Stripe team did a great job here.

It's a pretty common model -- create some valuable way for buyers and sellers of some service to connect. That's AirBnb, Uber, Lyft, Ebay, Postmates, etc. It can be a hard business to start because of the chicken and egg problem but often leads to a very defensible business because of the network effects.

As do other partners. This was a different block though, one that our house was on.

(I'm the author)

Sorry for my lack of clarity here. We weren't pitching customers in Mountain View, we were just walking around a block a few hundred times -- talking and thinking with each other.

Woah woah. I've never sold a company before. Dan was the COO of Giftly, which sold.

It is hard to get in to YC without something, but we didn't have a demo. You can read our whole app at: http://blog.zactownsend.com/our-yc-s13-application

In my YC class, I would say the median age was roughly mine: 28. Any number of founders were in their late 30s and 40s.

Well you get $14-20k + an $80k note, so you can easily pay two-three people minimum wage (plus rent) for summer.

Speaking of which, we could use some help with hiring, Leo. :)

Payments. Loans. Corporate Finance. Those all sound necessary, ya. I think the product plan and it's rollout is really the secret sauce - even in a world where execution is everything.

I'd love to pick your brain. I've chatted some with Roelof and Dana about x.com but I think it was actually before their time. I'd really like to unpack that history a little bit and understand the problems. One obvious difference in our vision and it's is that we'd prefer to start on the commercial side.

More generally, we've just found it difficult - in the current regulatory environment - to find a small bank that is also forward-thinking.

I wouldn't call that article the most accurate written about Standard Treasury.

Thanks for the encouragement Josh!

We raised a round post-YC. Oh, and we have revenue too. We're up to eight people and have a long runway.

Buying a bank would take a different sort of capital though. One has to think about working with PE/hedge funds (some of whom have already bought banks) or even sovereign wealth.

I'm the author.

I wouldn't agree. If you built a bank, you aren't subject to the same money transmission regulations. You're subject to many other regulations...