On episode 1143, Courtland Allen explains how he got inspired to start Indie hackers after

witnessing extreme founder worship at Y-combinator.

Really, I think the moment of inspiration for me was probably in 2011 when I moved to San Francisco

and got into Y Combinator.

And if I am being honest about my motivations, like I wanted to start a company, I wanted to get rich, and I wanted to do it basically having a lot of fun, which for me meant writing a lot of code, being creative, not having a boss, not having to report to anybody.

I would much rather make a lot of money doing it that way than working a desk job or going to Wall Street

like a lot of other people that I knew.

But when I showed up at YC it was a little bit different than I thought. There was almost this weird like I don't have to explain it like this

culture of like hero worshiping as a little bit off putting to me. I remember a day where Mark and Dreeson came into

YC and you know he's this very tall like six foot two like you know egghead looking guys very striking figure and they're like hundreds of

founders just like huddled around him trying to ask him a question and people

ask me for his autograph and I was like what about like the part where we build

stuff and we're not just sort of sucking up to these

different figures and the people who I really looked up to NYC were the people that

nobody else mobbed. I remember Kevin Hale came and gave a talk and he was running

this company Wufu.

And he talked about how they packed their bags,

left Silicon Valley, moved to Florida,

and they were making millions of dollars a year.

They were turning down all their investor phone calls

and they were like sharing their profits with the team and just

chilling out living a great life and I was like that sounds like the company that I

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