How to become a billionaire

Paul Graham says that the best way to secure YC funding is to convince the investors that "what you're making will ever be something a lot of people want" (Paul Graham, Dec. 2020). 

Here are some money quotes:

1. "So this is one thing the YC partners will almost certainly dig into during your interview. Who are your first users going to be, and how do you know they want this? If I had to decide whether to fund startups based on a single question, it would be "How do you know people want this?""
2. "The worst advice I ever heard about how to succeed in a YC interview is that you should take control of the interview and make sure to deliver the message you want to. In other words, turn the interview into a pitch. ⟨elaborate expletive⟩. It is so annoying when people try to do that."
3. "If professional billionaire scouts know that exploiting people is not the skill to look for, why do some politicians think this is the defining quality of billionaires?"
4. "The most reliable way to become a billionaire is to start a company that grows fast, and the way to grow fast is to make what users want. Newly started startups have no choice but to delight users, or they'll never even get rolling. But this never stops being the lodestar, and bigger companies take their eye off it at their peril. Stop delighting users, and eventually someone else will.

Students offer $100 to other students to drop classes

This article in the Daily Californian reports that students on a wait list for a course have offered $100 to registered students to withdraw. Question: would accepting the offer move resources from low-value uses to high-value uses?

Walmart = the most successful social welfare system ever implemented

"Walmart is one of the wonders of the modern world, built from scratch in a hyper-competitive environment, scaled from nothing to the largest company in the US by revenue and by headcount, all resulting from a singular vision of saving everyday people money with everyday low prices. It is the most successful social welfare system ever implemented, saving billions and billions of dollars for everyday Americans without costing taxpayers a dime. It is a testament to the power of compounding interest, to the power of a focused plan executed violently for decades" (Zack Kanter).