How Y Combinator Started
<i>So doing the winter batch in California seemed like one of those rare cases where the self-indulgent choice and the ambitious one were the same.</i><p>There is nothing more heavenly, more sublime than that rare situation in life in which the self-indulgent choice and the ambitious choice align.  There's a keen insight to be had there.<p>Unfortunately, those moments are very rare.<p>For instance, at least, in terms of my personal temperament and disposition, I have found that I most enjoy life, from a "human" perspective, in places that are terrible places to do business, and may, in fact, have very dysfunctional local economies, high amount of corruption, etc.  I'm the kind of person that has the most fun in the colour of Greece, Italy, southern Spain, Portugal, Argentina, etc. I can appreciate the comparative orderliness and clockwork of Teutonic and Anglo-American civilisation, but it doesn't make me happy, and yet I need that whole universe in order to sustain my livelihood in any practical sense.  But everything else about it doesn't make me very happy.<p>I wish there were some way to reconcile those two.  I haven't found any place that has an optimal intersection of cowbell on the one hand, and practicality on the other.  Maybe it exists, but I haven't found it.  However, my natural sense is that there is a inherent, perennial tension between the two.<p>That's why that particular phrase really got me.  I wish dearly for such a Shangri-la.