Reader,

We're smack dab in the middle of Week 1 of Y Combinator Startup School, and the experience, so far, has already been eye-opening.

With a program like this, you get out of it as much as you put into it, so we're going all in. We need the discipline. And we need to tighten up the whole story so that I can deliver it, coherently, to prospective investors. This is what YC does, so the timing is perfect.

For example, in just a few days, we basically reorganized all of our decision making around a single, key metric. Until further notice, this is the only graph you'll ever see in these emails:

So, once and for all all, there's the official roller coaster, folks. When that soars, we soar. When it tanks, we tank. We have a few months to make something happen. Buckle up!

Quite a riddle: Should we be okay with these numbers? I like Jeff's take:

And, believe it or not, we're frying even bigger fish up in here. After more than three years with two core values, we're "officially" adding a third:

CORE VALUE #3: Be open to anything

So, consider that locked, hard. Thanks to this Y Combinator program, Jeff and I have had to dig deep, as a team and individuals, on the big picture. A lot of long calls, basically. We didn't set out to achieve superhuman levels of shared consciousness and then - boom! - crap out a core value, but that's what just happened.

Onward and UPward!

-Bill

P.S. Omg, Ha ha! Ha ha!