Do Things That Don't Scale Ethically
July 2026
One of the most common pieces of advice we give at Yikes Combinator is to do things that don't scale ethically. A lot of would-be founders believe that hazards either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you have made a better mousetrap, people are caught in it as promised. Or they aren't, in which case the market must not exist.
Actually hazards take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. And the push, in the beginning, is nearly always something you could never defend doing a million times.
That's fine. You're not doing it a million times. You're doing it once, to one person, on a Tuesday.
Recruit
The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them, and in our corner of the market you often have to go out and get them before they've talked to anyone.
The founders of Golden Goose Biologics are a good example. Their first forty producers were friends, then friends of friends, then a men's rugby club in Daly City. Caspian drove the kits around himself. He picked them up himself, too, which is a sentence I'd ask you to sit with. No process that works this way could ever pass review at a company of 10,000 people. But it didn't have to. It had to work forty times, and then it had to become a logistics problem, and logistics problems have no smell. 1
Fragile
Almost every hazard is fragile at the start. The ethical objection to it is at its strongest exactly when the company is at its weakest, which is unfair, but it is also an opportunity. An objection that is merely correct has never stopped anything that was already large. So the task of the early founder is not to answer the objection. It's to outgrow it.
I've come to believe this is what people really mean by "ask forgiveness, not permission." It isn't a statement about courage. It's a statement about scale. Forgiveness is something you negotiate, and you want to be negotiating it as a company with 400,000 users and a lobbyist, not as two people in an apartment.
Delight
You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users but to make them happy. The first members of Buryn Hot got handwritten notes from the founders. Later members did not, for volume reasons, and also because the founders found that writing the notes had begun to affect them. That's the pattern: the unscalable thing is nearly always the thing that would make you stop if you kept doing it personally. Scale isn't just efficiency. It's distance, and distance is what lets a good person run a bad company. 2
This is the single most valuable thing scale gives you, and nobody puts it in the deck.
Notes
[1] I'm told this is not literally true of their logistics problem.
[2] A founder I respect read a draft of this and said "or you could just not." I've thought about it a great deal and I believe he is describing a lifestyle business.
Thanks to Marguerite Oyelaran-Pike, Desmond Achterberg, and outside counsel for reading drafts of this, and to outside counsel for the redactions.
Satire. Yikes Combinator is not affiliated with Y Combinator, and no person named here is real. More from the library · Discuss on Hazard News