Blitzscaling 02: Sam Altman on Y Combinator and What Makes The Best Founders

things have a look about Y Combinator and yeah it sure isn't how it works uh so we fund star not only that mostly that we sort of look at our role as enabling as much innovation as we can in the world startups a really good way to do that we fund about 250 startups per year in our core program and then we have a new thing called the fellowship program that we're going to scale up much beyond that which is one tenth of the money and less advice but we think is that we figured out a way to sort of build this made a company that helps startups a lot and so if you're part of YC you know we want you to have 100x leg up on where you would be otherwise and we try to give advice and connections and access to this community where we can offer things that just really help startups so you know we try to figure out the advice that really matters but mostly the thing you get is this alumni community and they're now more than 2,000 people we've funded people feel very strong affinity to YC they work with other YC companies help them fundraise higher by each other's products whatever and and we really sort of try to make that a tight community but so we're somewhere between like a product company and a traditional investing firm I think something happened that maybe three or four years ago where maybe maybe four or five years ago when people started really really identifying as being part of YC and part of the fact but you dropped out of Stanford I did yeah I wouldn't what year did you drop out oh five oh five I mean what what year were you a stamp oh I was going to finish in three years so sort of my last year and you had done the CS core or so you knew how to code yep and you dropped out to start looped I did and did you start looped and then go to YC or did you yes so I had I wasn't called that time as project I was working on with some friends and then we act I'm pretty sure that we started we went back to try to figure this out I'm pretty sure we started working on it just about the day that YC announced that it was going to be this thing we didn't think much about it then we didn't even hear about it right then but working on this and then heard about it in detail and really seriously considered the day before applications were due it was like I think it was like April middle of April something like that so we applied right then and flew out there to Boston and you know it was at like at this point the world of investing has really changed I think probably because of YC but the at you know in 2005 like it seemed very mystical it seemed like people really wanted like business people running these companies not engineers and they were like there was all these things and if you didn't know like the right words you know it didn't work and that people really wanted like business plans and financial models and whatever else and so we got to YC it was like these are our people like you know these are engineers themselves they care about the product not the business plan not the financial model and you know I think it actually took the YC partners maybe two years to figure out what they were onto but to the founders they funded to the eight companies when that first batch we knew right away and we were very confident this is what the future of investing was going to look like because we'd seen it the other way and you know in the ten years since then I think it's it's really changed I got involved as a part-time partner in YC in 2011 and you know that point YC was still fairly small but even by then like the environment had tipped in favor of the founders yeah i think that what sam says is really right yeah I was here in 1995 as when I left and there was nothing you could find out how to fish species I didn't know VCS and no investors and by 2005 you know you had guys like Tom Byers and stuff who would in Tennessee they could either please connect you up right but yeah there's sort of it I don't think it was that effective honestly I think that if it were you know like YC never should have been able to be as successful to being able to be I think the sort of the last generation of investors just sort of dropped the ball just great I'm happy about it I think the new world is way better for founders but it's a kind of crazy leap of faith you made to fly away from Silicon Valley to Boston but it maybe didn't feel like that um no it was it felt a little crazy but like you know we needed money and they were giving us money and we needed advice and they were giving us advice okay I was not excited about it I was actually just in Boston and I went I sort of walked by the apartment I lived in that summer and I was like I so happy not to have ended up living in Boston Boston's a fairly nice place but it's it's not here it's not here nowhere else in the world is here it's really like the I think it's happens to like a lot of Stanford students it's really hard to like ever leave and so we get sucked into this like vortex and we can never move more than a hundred miles away from campus yeah but it's one of the pieces one of the quarters of class and no surprise given Reid right it's like networks are kind of everything and there were some information networks into you know allowed Gil who founded color and it was something he wrote a blog post about this that why sees a network effects business which I don't think anybody knew ten years ago I'm like anyone near ten years or I still don't think people understand how much of the case that's going to be you know there's the statistic that people ask me about a lot so there's but 2500 accelerators in the world there are eight billion plus dollar companies that have ever been created in any accelerator and all eight of those are NYC which is like not an obvious statistic that that should be the case and people ask why and my answer is always that there is actually network effect at this stage of funding it doesn't exist at the venture stage I don't think as much you know there are there are five or ten really great firms all of which should do very well but we have been very fortunate to pretty much dominate our stage of investing and you know the difference between the number one the number two at our stage looks more like the difference between Facebook and like my year but I don't even know what the number two is anymore um the and I think the reason for that is because it is really a network effects business you evaluate from YC as much as I'd like to think it's the advice from my partners is the advice is that that sort of the network you get of YC alumni and other companies you talk about how that plays out because I talk a lot of founders who will ask other founders for help or founders from a couple batches before and you know it's a little bit like HBS you know you used to be an alumni of HBS you could pick up the phone and yes when they answer um you know the one of the things that makes our stage of investing specials we are the first investor in these companies and you feel I remember this is a founder myself the the loyalty you feel towards your investors goes down exponentially with time so the first people that take a bet on you you really care about because they took a bet on you when you were a few people on an idea you're a row investors still you know bought stock before you want obvious success you're seeing d round investors yeah they had to think you were smart but they're mostly just investing off of a financial model and then might um you get the public shareholders like they don't care about you at all and they will sell your shares you know if your earnings missed by a penny back quarter so because we're the first investor I think the founders feel a stronger bond with us then subsequent investors and thus are more willing to sort of like give back to the community also now that that flywheels up and going because people help other companies I don't mean this be a YC commercial maybe get off this topic soon better um because people sort of like help other companies during the program so much they feel like they need to pay that on and you know we then we do things to like help the community so we do a we take all our founders camping once a year and people just hang out and they talk about how things are going and you have peers you have like other people it's very lonely to be a founder so when you have other people you can talk to about like man that's really hard that's actually really important it's not obvious how important that is we have like spaces that the founders can come hang out together in like office space we also have online spaces private social networks for the founders so we really do try to cultivate this community and that is what gives us sort of phonemic effect it's not really commercial you know the whole point is class is that Silicon Valley has these big companies that get very big very fast but a lot by knowing how to step on the gas and how to use the network that's up underneath them and it just occurs to me that YC is a very good example of that yeah push on the gas recently in a bunch of different ways okay so one last thing about wise actually that's one more thing so you are a founder and CEO of Lube yep but you were sort of an outsider coming into not an outsider exactly but you're a new partner and you took over as president at well I had been involved in YC in some sense or other like from the very beginning even before I was like officially a part time partner I sort of did that as just for fun like I would advise companies and subsequent batches um close friends with Paul Graham all the way through so just hang out and help him and then I became a part-time partner officially in 2011 I also so my company got acquired in 2012 while I was there I was sort of looking for something to do on the side so I raised a venture fund which was really important actually because I learned that I did not want to be a venture investor no offense yeah no no no no I I don't I'm yeah I don't love the class either um but I really hated it I was like you know I feel like I there's no way I can say this next part without offending your college apologize I I felt like I was you know like a public equity picker like I was not actually adding value to the world I was allocating capital but there were a lot of other people allocating capital in the same space and so I was trying to like identify the best companies a little bit sooner and do a little bit better of a sales pitch to get them to take my money because the best companies today have like a huge amount of people trying really hard to give them money on and it felt really different than the you know a little bit of a seed investing I had done before I had much money in like 2009-2010 and this was when I was like writing $15,000 cheques and you know like the founders had no other options and if I didn't invest maybe these companies didn't happen and I realized that that was actually where I felt like I was having an impact on the world so I I had learned that I did not want to go be a venture investor I did not want to be in a public equities picker I did not want to be competing to get my dollars into companies that were already going to be successful like I wanted to actually enable new companies and so as I was like thinking about what I was going to do next I sort of retired for a year and you know like did all the normal stuff then it was I want to run some sort of company and I want to pick the job that will have maximal impact on the world and now find that boy see for the record I kind of agree like I think that venture investors are not as important early but I think there's a lot of work that happens it's a little different there's a huge amount of work like like a great board member and we tell our companies all the time a great board member in your series in Iran is like the most important thing to optimize for and we at YC ourselves are not good at that and if you don't get that it's very hard to build one of these multi-billion dollar companies but that's not what I was good at nor did I what I really want to do so if I if I was going to be a later stage investor I was going to be one of these like hands off later stage investors okay and so what is what has been president of why see how's it different when you were founder and CEO of your own thing um it's not that different it's much more like being a CEO than being an investor oh yeah yeah I guess I mean when I was CEO Mozilla was really different than I was CEO my startup because being a founder and CEO and growing the whole thing it's just a little bit different relationship I thought it was a little bit different relationship with the organization you know there's this weird way in which I it's very hard to like take over from a founder in any case it's very hard to be a new CEO but YC was very small when I took over uh you know we triple the number of partners maybe more since I joined and because I had been around while like I was literally the first Czech guy I was there for the founding of Boise first Chapel I see ever ever wrote and so I had sort of the credibility with the organization I had the muscle memory that it was not a particularly traumatic you know these sort of leadership handoffs in sort of relatively high profile companies are usually much more traumatic than this one was and I think the reason for that is just because I knew the organization so well I've been involved for so long um but I was like an internal candidate or whatever yeah I mean I remember Paul talking a lot about how you and he were very similar to Outlook he hadn't found anybody who thought quite like you did where to him I mean read talks you know I can interpret for Mitchell do it took a long time to develop that relationship read talks a lot about Geoff ting over him and he's credits the idea of the second founding of LinkedIn you know in a lot of ways why she feels different to me now than it did a couple years ago before you took over well I think for successful new CEOs it has to be refunding every time yep I mean I don't people talk about that like it's a rare thing I think every time it works 100% of the time it has to be sort of a refunding of the company um so yeah I think you know we've done some different things it probably looks more different on the outside than it does on the inside you know on the inside like we just do the same thing we sit around every day and we try to figure out how to find the best founders in the world and how to help them and how to build YC into this sort of platform that other companies can sort of get big on top of and you know like we do that in different ways and we have some big new way coming but internally it feels sort of because the mission is so clear because everyone knows why we do what we do inside if we change the how we do it a little bit here and there it actually doesn't feel that different that's cool that's neat so why don't we as advertised we talked about is like Sam C sees thousands of startup sees many more founders helps hundreds of startups give or take probably roughly so let's talk about team for a little bit so what consistent qualities do you see in the best founders in companies this we talk about a lot we actually have tracked this over years and we're eight founders on different qualities and sort of we see what seems to matter in no particular order the sort of ones I'd say are incredibly important clarity of vision you know like Ken the founder explain exactly what they do and why if if the founder can't explain it clearly to us then a they are never gonna be able to recruit hire or sell talk to the press anything and be it means they're not the kind of person that is are really clear thinker in general and that's just so important to a business so in clearing it clearly i works a lot of people ask them if you don't know exactly what you're starting with you start right well you know what you're going to go work on in the next few weeks and you know kind of why you're doing what you're doing so like you know with Airbnb for example when they won they applied to YC they were doing this thing that seemed a little bit hokey to all of us where you stayed on a stranger's air bed and while they were still there and none of us wanted to do that um but they knew exactly how to do that they could explain exactly how it worked why they were doing it and the vision for the company was that you know we want like Brian told the story of like well does not my grandfather used to travel and you know it's a lot better to like stay in a locals house and with a local than it is to stay in sort of like you know the four seasons of wherever which all look somehow exactly the same with one decor element from whatever the city is for the country um so it the vision was so clearly articulated it then took a little while to evolve into exactly what everybody is today which is where you discover that you can rent out the whole house the whole apartment um but he was so clear on why he was going to build this and what the end state vision was and then what the short-term like what he currently had to do to make it work so that's one - as we look for people that are sort of like very determined and very passionate about what they're doing there are founders who like don't take no for an answer and there are founders who just like bend the world to their will and those are the ones we're going to fund and then there are the founders that every time they run across a small impediment just turn around and fortunately you run over some of the impediment run into some of the impediments every day that if you're the kind of person that just turns around at those that's like really a problem on this and and you also have to like really believe that what you're doing is important you know the best companies are always somehow mission oriented that even if it's just that the founder like loves the idea of building a big company in this space that he or she knows really well that element is always there and so determination and passion together like that intersection is really important obviously raw intelligence that one is obvious um the the ability to sort of get things done quickly this is not quite the same as determination there are determined people who are still very slow movers and that works in a lot of things in life it does not work for founders it's not entirely accurate to say that speed and quality of decision-making correlates exactly with startup success but it's not like a bad first approximation the being quick and being decisive and getting things done quickly if you look at our data that that that would just correlate almost exactly with all of our successful founders and other founders to look on paper like they should be really successful but fail often are missing this one trait and how do you how do you how you judge for that well this is one of the advantages of operating the scale that we do you know we look at twenty thousand companies a year something like that so we just get so much data that you understand the interview questions to ask and the responses that correlate with different your de tarnishing you'd read the book the Martian it's like 8th on my book stack right now it's a pretty good book to read is this not about a guy gets marooned on Mars but it's all problem solving it's like okay I've got to solve this problem go do it and then the side effect of solving that problem means this other thing comes wildly undone which is a very startup B it's the best book about startups have read in a long time you guys guy on Mars you know the trick to being a great founder at least in the early stages and honestly this kind of goes on forever is your ability to be presented with a problem unlike anything you've seen before and solve it very quickly yes Ron and that you know like there are some people that love that and some people that hate that um you talked about solo founders versus two-person team yeses bigger um we prefer two or three person team founding teams but we are not religiously opposed to solo founders and we funded a number of solo founders that have gone on to be successful although in all of those cases they got a co-founder at some point after we funded them so I believe like Dropbox and instacart at the moment we said yes to funding them didn't have a co-founder but either before our program started or quickly after both of them did but we're not we're not like totally opposed the issue the two issues one there's like a lot of work and it's really hard for only one if I'm going to do it and two is that the like the psychological toll of being a sole founder even people that think they're really tough and shondor estimate this so look it's definitely possible although he made a list of the sort of 10 billion plus dollar tech companies and looked at how many of those didn't have co-founders by say six months in it's a pretty short list I guess um it's definitely worse to have a co-founder than to not have a co-founder than have a bad co-founder so what we really hate is when people like bring on a co-founder because they think we'll like it that ends and heartache 100% of the time literally a hundred percent of the time but the you know I think start working on an idea without a co-founder but never stop looking for one of your isola founder and and the biggest companies seem to generally have had you know two or three founders like almost always I'm okay I actually got to get a single one it had a real soul with honour in the psychological sense talks about is real like it's a lonely job but also it's people telling you you're more on a bunch of times in a row and you just have to mostly not care it's people it's a lot of things that are hard it's just a little bit easier if you have someone else to talk to you know ideally when you like everyone's going through these like ups and downs for this like wave and and hopefully with two founders you're not very often both at the bottom so one of you sort of like cheers the other one up but in theory that's not supposed to work you'll hit your both it bottomed occasion it does happen yeah and what do you think about what you're doing to say about teams of three or four or more three is certainly fine you know the number of companies that have had three founders and gone on to be very successful like they're being me which is the most successful company we founded for is harder what happens in practice with four is usually someone ends up leaving in the first couple of years and then it's a team of of three or two we talk about that so what happens when founder is aren't getting along how do you tell how do you encourage you to work through disagreements and one of you you know we um all co-founders get into big fights at some point they don't all come tell us about it but many of them do and we try to help them work through it but there have been plenty of times where you said look this relationship is done one of you needs to move on yeah and then today you find people or conflict avoidant you find people run into each other they're all different yeah it all depends their own personality style so there's no there's no one pattern there yeah yeah did you Joe co-founder yeah we actually really had plenty fights but we got along yeah well yeah we went through microfibers and I went through phases where we got along and then after I left went to a phase or a year or two or he just didn't didn't really want to hang out much mom they got better after that better no it's an emotional thing I mean it's you're putting everything into it for a little while okay and then what do you think so um it's about diversity for a second not of the ecosystem level but at the founding team level how do you think about diversity at a fad like first two or three or four or five people yeah I think that it's a clear win I mean I think that the you should never force you should never hire a team member just because of diversity but diversity backgrounds diversity of perspectives that's really good the only bad kind of diversity that we have observed in startups is diversity of vision where founders have a very different belief about the kind of company they want to build not not so much what the company is going to build but the kind of company you know what like what kind of culture we can have how are we going to make decisions how are we going to decide whether we sell or not how you decide we hire how are we going to like handle disagreements so if you have founders that don't agree on that that is the bad that is the killer usually kind of diversity yeah I think he's grab we would say or he asks out on Twitter II think diversity and starting teams is bad I tend to agree with him because I think if you have differences that are too acute and how you do things or how you process things or how you work it makes you slow at the beginning instead of faster able to solve problems is that match what you think or um well again it comes to the diversity of vision if people want different things if people have a different place for where they want the two times you get conflict in a startup when is when people want different things for the company and when they want the same things for themselves those are the two areas where we see the most conflict among the founding Taylor's day so you know if you have like you can have two people that very like you know like a hard charger and sort of like a softer person and you have conflict about the kind of company want to build or you can have like I like two people that have exactly the same background you know they like grew up in the same environment and they both want to be the CEO and they both on their face on the magazine cover that conflict is actually the worst one that that gets really nasty so both of those things are bad what you really want our complementary teams where the people have the same vision for what kind of company they want to build and how they want to get there and they bring very different skills to the table so for a long time you know the classic co-founding team was one very strong business person one very strong tech person and that worked really well a lot of times now it shifted more towards to really strong tech people that works a lot of the times it really does I think that maybe better overall but when those people want exactly the same thing then there's a lot of internal conflict but you know like a diversity of skillsets diversity of backgrounds great and I think that's that's worked a lot of times like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak it's true they're both white guys but like within the realm of white guys very diverse people that's right I think it's interesting thing about co-founders like a lot of times what I'll see is two technical people but one decides to be the product owner and one decides to be the technology owner and that works out fine too it's just I think understanding what what you each like and what you're good at is the thing and so what about um so say you've got founding teams they start to put together demos to get a little bit of momentum and they say well there's really a lot more work than we thought so we need to go harsh hire somebody how do you help people figure out how to hire a lot of increasingly people not only have not hired people they worked for somebody yeah look I think hiring has always been hard and always been sort of like fraught with peril in the current environment it is harder and more fraught with peril than ever before and so there's more and more of a premium on being able to do a lot without hiring so we have noticed this trend for a long time where our best startups hire the least and our worst startups are the ones that want to say I have 10 people working for me I'm really cool and they go off and hire but if you have employees then like you have a burn rate and in today's salary market it's a very high burn rate you have more organizational inertia it gets really hard to turn the Battleship when you have a lot of employees it's just like the two or three co-founders you say hey this thing's not working on it is our thing ok you have internal politics you have people think about their career trajectories you need all these things once the company is really ready to scale before the company is really ready to scale on this this just creates this like it's there's this potential energy in the company of smart people that want to do something and they're not exactly sure what to do and you don't have enough for them to like really run at full speed and it just causes problems so you know Airbnb I think they took like nine months to hire their first person stripe took about that long to Dropbox took a very very long time I think companies always want to hire because they think it'll make them more effective and they think it'll like give them status it does give you status but it definitely makes you less effective so we really like the companies that figure out how long they can wait to hire their first non founder employee it can be agonizing because you've got only couple people and you're trying to do work and feels like you're making very very slow progress you just said well if we just multiply this times five or six like things would go faster but a lot of times especially perspective Santos Santos I'm out around clarity of vision like it takes you a little while to figure out how to really be clear on some of the important things if you hire people before you clear that would you get eaten up on communication effects and like the number of interconnections and like sounds and people wanting different things right that's interesting so um into given your the you flew to Boston the first time yeah how do you think about Bay Area versus other places now um I still I think the Bay Area is the the best place in the world and start to start up short um and I would definitely start a start up here the costs are the one thing that could break that you mean just dollar costs the dollar cost of living here yeah you know when you're a start-up and you're like trying to survive as many months as you can because if you have like a linear amount of money and an exponential growth of users in revenue each extra month you can survive a long time and so each 20% increase in the cost of living is really bad I think it's the best place to start startups you know you since you mentioned sort of diversity earlier one thing that has been odd to me is that the the Bay Area feels to have gotten less diverse in terms of funding teams like yep in this classroom I fifteen women maybe yeah um like two black people I got is that's like a shame yeah uh and this is the startup class and Stanford is much more diverse than the people in this room and I don't know what it is about the bay area that has gotten that feels like it's gotten less diverse relative to the rest of the world but you know when because we spend a huge amount of time traveling we fund people from all over the world more than half the people we fund are not born in the US and I think there were 40-something countries represented last time the rest of the world is certainly a more diverse than a barrier when it comes to to startups yeah I think so too I think we've gone backwards too I'm not quite sure what to make of it we were a little surprised in this class on the top of the fall we just didn't see a lot of gender diversity at all and so that makes me think that the next time we do it we need to really focus on sources sourcing more which is obvious we know that in our startups and you just kind of seems crazy we didn't just apply it here but I think that's one of the problems I didn't think I suspect we have a bunch of nationality spread here but are certainly not gender spread yeah it's um it's certainly a problem not sure what else to say about it you guys have done some things to look I think that everyone diversity is actually not as hard as everyone was it is you know less than half of our partnership is white white guy's great you know that means we'll fund really diverse people too we fund like we just track to make sure that we reach out to as broad of a set of people as we can and then we make sure that we fund them you know plus or minus the rate they apply yep and so I think everyone well we're both white guys sasuke's I think white guys like say the problem is much harder to solve than actually is I think it's just I think yes we can solve it yep yep uh we're definitely white guys um all right these are interviewing skills Charlie Rose level so this is like class number twos who are still working through it so um so let's talk about idea for a while now we talk about team forever but let's have an idea so maybe PG says like the key is to find good ideas that actually seem bad could you yeah this is actually a Peter teal is not not a PG ism but I think it is the central like if you if you think that what you're looking for are undervalued assets then it obviously makes sense that you want the really good ones that look to most people like they're bad because the really good ones everyone will be going after and they'll be super competitive and the really bad ones obviously you don't want to fund so this idea of great ideas that look bad certainly has what has led to outsized returns investing in startups and starting startups and it's harder to do than you think like I think we're all like much more affected by trends and what other people like then we'd like to believe so it's it's really hard to have a lot of conviction and unpopular idea as a founder or an investor um it gets easier with time on the investing side because you realize like that's where you make your money and also like what people say about you being stupid you don't care about as long as you keep winning um but it is the temptation like I like to think of myself as an independent thinker and I still find the temptation to just like whatever other people like very strong um so it is really hard to do this you don't want to be an investor that's investing in a derivative of the thing that was just really big so you know in 2006 7 & 8 every most investors were trying to invest in the next Facebook and then in the 2009-2010 they really got crazy about trying to invest in the next Facebook in 2009 2010 the two companies that mattered to invest in as a venture investor were urban Airbnb these look nothing like Facebook when Facebook was raising money in 2004 or five whatever that was 2004 I guess um most in Google had just gone public about to go public and there was a huge amount of focus on you know ad tech businesses and even some search businesses and that's exactly that was exactly the wrong thing to be investing in you know all of those companies failed and why you should have been investing in his Facebook which looked nothing like the giant winner before it um now a lot of investors are rushing to invest in uber like things this idea that I push a button and something happens you know so everyone's trying to say well were they going to be the uber for food we're gonna be the uber for like dog walking and it's real and the next goober will be a hundred billion dollar company but the next hundred billion dollar company is very unlikely to be any of these you know like thin verticals on top of uber it will be something totally new so while everyone else is starting those you should nor all of those ideas they're going to be brutally competed away from you and they have very very bad economics anyway um and and what you should instead do is say hey like what is the next hundred billion dollar company there's nothing to do with the last what is the shift in the world like what you know what what is shifted in the world to enable a giant new company it didn't exist a while ago and then go start that company and look here's the hard part of this it done it's going to look bad it's going to look bad so you have to have internal conviction that it actually is good and a lot of people are going to tell you well why don't you just like do it on the man company because that's everyone's doing and you have to just have sort of the courage of your convictions to keep doing this on popular thing because you understand where the world is going in a way that other people don't and how do you how do you do that how do you develop internal conviction well there are there are a few tricks for this we've learned one is that once you start once something really starts to grow and you can tell that users really love your product it gets easier to sort of not worry about what the haters say and so the quicker you can launch and the quicker you can have a set of users that become dependent on your product the better you'll feel so Ober once they launched a lot of people made fun of them but a few people used it all the time you know and it was just like the expensive black cars and so while the rest of the world's making fun of them they knew they were on to something because they were growing like connects every year or whatever it was more than that definitely one that um and so I think once one of the advantages of watching quickly is that it will give you conviction even when the rest of the world is telling you this thing is like bad so that that is important to do I think another thing is if you if the reason that you have conviction is a shift in the world that people who have been doing the same thing for 20 or 30 years have missed and you can identify precisely what that was you go back to the uber example this idea that everyone had an internet-connected device in their pocket and no one did three years ago was an obviously huge change that unless you really pay attention you could have missed how important that was I think if you have if you can rationalize if you can explain to yourself why you have this conviction because something the world has changed that helps connect 'support something real quick so you said you know launch as quickly as possible as quickly as possible is like a complicated phrase because to diverge for a second you're on the board of two companies building fusion right yeah nuclear reactors that's right nuclear yeah they're going to take a little while longer launch then well they're going to take a while to like launch the final product but they break it up into small internal products that are measured very precisely and you know like they know exactly what they're trying to improve 10% every week we when we started doing the hard tech companies at Y Combinator a lot of people this is again this is a good like courage of your conviction story the prevailing wisdom was that we were gonna like be horrible this because we don't understand these companies and they take years in a different cycle than the software companies and what we thought is that actually what hasn't worked with these companies is they don't look enough like internet startups you know they actually need to operate with the cadence and speed of an Airbnb or reddit or whatever and that was the problem and so we brought them into our same program and no one likes to feel like they're losing if you're around companies that are you know measuring something and it's going up 10% every week after a little while you're like well my life sucks I'm gonna figure out something that I can measure and I'm gonna go faster and that works so we have to work hard with the hard tech companies to figure out what their core metric is and what they can get ten percent better at each week but a company has got to get better it's something it's something ten percent each week in the early days and if you compound if you can have this product cycle or whatever you're building is ten percent better every week and you project that out you do that for three or four years and then you're like you know a really big company that'll be lesson two compounding interest is pretty good ten percent of week is a lot so but how will you know whether this is right or not so your thesis about building hard things make them more like software companies it's going to take a little while to figure out it feels like it's really working and we won't know for sure for you know five years look like the fusion company works no one ever says anything again about whether or not YC can invest in hard tech companies but you know we do need some of them to work right so you just won't know for a little while okay we talked about we talked about a bunch of these somebody in the class who can you safely ignore when they tell you your idea is bad not ignore true that you can nor everybody you can annoy everybody except users yeah if your users are telling your your product sucks and you can't find any other users that think your product is good that as bad as the constituency to listen to yep that's good answer and so what about sharps who pivot how do you know how do you decide when to do that and um look I think Silicon Valley really gets the pivot thing wrong I think like it's like I try never to go to startup parties but every once in a while I forget why I don't go to them and you know I go and the the last when I was out I was really struck by how much people were like bragging about pivoting this is basically bragging about failing and I think like the the attitude towards failure should be like tolerant but hey that sucks like let's not do that again and and I do think we sort of over glorify failure we try to learn too much I we talk too much about how great failures failure is still bad like it's important that it's tolerated it's important that it's not held against you but it's certainly not something to go out of your way and celebrate and I think the pivot culture sort of a little bit is like people brag about how many times they pivoted the only kind of pivots that I have seen work are the following one it's what the founder wanted to build all along anyway and two it's what the founders discovered while they were building their first thing that didn't work um so for example I give one for each Instagram Kevin Systrom had done this other thing called bourbon it was not working he went away on vacation and built the thing he actually wanted to build he loved photography but at this time at this point the iPhone cameras were not very good and so you needed filters to make them like look intentionally bad instead of just bad because the sensor was bad so you know if you make it look like this like old cool look that's okay those sensor doesn't need to be perfect it was brilliant so that was what he actually in the build that was what he's actually passionate about those kind of hid that's work the other kind of pivots that work are the Airbnb founders for example or buildings other startup totally have money but not work at all no one give them money depths of the financial crisis they actually had maxed out so many credit cards you know those little like plastic sheets you put in binders the whole like nine baseball cards they were using those to hold their credit cards that had to max out and keep track of all of them like that's how out of money they were and their rent was due and they didn't have any money and they thought and thought involved the only thing that Brian had was you know a little bit of extra space in his apartment he had you know some number of dollars in his bank went was more dollars than that and it was doing ten days so he rented out his spare room for the amount of money of that Delta and I you know like it's got the crazy thing of all this is the Airbnb start is an affordable housing company so in the current like San Francisco you know a little piece of history um but I think that kind of pivot works as well other than those two classes of pivots the normal class of pivot is where founders sit down a ser startup is not working let's sit in front of a whiteboard and figure out our new thing I have never ever seen that work and I have a lot of reasons I think why you know if you're in a rush to think of an idea you're less likely to come with a good one if you already have investors you have to have a plausible sounding idea to go back to them with it's okay to have a bad idea a good idea that sounds bad to start with it's harder to pivot into such an idea so people try to find these ideas that sound reasonable on the pivots but yeah I would say that that investor thing I think is real investors do but there's some sort of weird social contract where you feel like you have to go put together a plan that works on a deck and that kind of stuff like the more thoughtful investors actually would prefer you just to say I just don't know what to do then to say here's a shitty idea that I'm going to keep working on even if you can wrap it up in a way that looks what I tell founders when they're thinking about it well the founders have a start but it's not working unless you have something a pivot in one of those two categories that I just mentioned shut the company down return the remaining capital to investors go travel the world and like wait until you have an organic new idea you want to work on yep yep slackers buy the most famous pivot lately and you know way slack stocks are is a game company they made glitch and what they realize is that nobody lights their game but their internal developers really liked using this IRC client they had built they became slot right so you know these when you build up when you build something that you discover other people need along the way as one of these like stripe was even a version of this you know Patrick had been building this on encyclopedia app this iPhone happen realized he couldn't take payments so sometimes you discover organically this other thing people like better yeah internal tooling is often a pattern like that and then there's a great essay you shall to read by Joe Kraus who started to excite and jotspot a couple he's brought about basically people say they like learning from failure but learning from failure is kind of stupid learning from success is the thing and but like sam says you should tolerate failure but it's not there's not a lot to learn from failure there's a lot to learn from being in a successful you learn better you learn more good well there's a lot to understand failure I'd say the most they're more important things to learn from success that's right yep so we here's my one piece of career advice if you're going to go join a company go join the most successful company growing as quickly as possible that you can find because that is how you will you will the lessons from seeing a really successful company for a few years sort of scale I think that is the only training that's only pre startup training is actually valuable I give that 100 percent also you get there's so much to do and there's so many holes that you get put in response in places responsibilities you're not nearly qualified for but it's the only way to really really learned come over in products you say you know a lot of what you write about a lot of a PG writes about is like focus on product yeah product product product market fit what is it what does focus on product mean to you um I mean you have you know maybe if you're really good and really dedicated you can work like 70 really productive hours in a week and so you have 70 hours to allocate and there's a question of how how you allocate those and we say focus on product it means that you put almost all of those into talking to users and and and creating product and making sure that you have some users that really love your product most startups face a choice in the early days either I'm going to get a lot of users that sort of are somewhat ambivalent they like me but they don't love me or I have a small number of users that really love me every really successful company I have been involved with has been in that second category so focus on product means focus on love not like and spend your time writing code and talking to users you need to get the product at the point where some people would be really really bummed if it went away yep so this is gonna be a funny question because I think yci educate over time to help so for enterprise cost companies how do you help them think about how to get their first customer their first 10 customers like with YC what happens now is that a lot of YC companies become customers yeah but if you don't have that Network how do you think about it well I spent all my time working with YC companies so I have a really easy answer for the enterprise sales companies because they always do get their customers among the YC community that something is shockingly uniform now um but I don't really know what you do without that I don't I honestly I just don't advise not only C company anymore yep Siri okay we'll keep moving these all have to answer later in the quarter I think it's really hard to do that without like a built-in network of some sort it is I mean Greylock we sort of are coming from scratch and we help introduce people to you have to find sort of an enlightened customer who understands what it is to be at work with a start-up YC companies kind of by definition understand that I think it's almost always network based no matter what you know what you use okay let's talk about something else so like you wrote a little while ago by the post YC slump yeah you get the demo day and then things change you talk about that um and this is a broader at the retailer broad reps it's a broader phenomenon it's not just YC so start ups work really well when the founders have the gas pedal all the way down to the floor and you know yes a lot of internal things are broken but you just keep growing and you keep winning that feels good and then the hard part is at some point you have to go clean up the technical debt the organizational that the cultural debt whatever and and and founders always think okay I'm just going to stop worrying about growth entirely and fix these other things and in theory that sounds like it should work that you can focus on one thing or the other but the issue is if you take the focus off growth this board member of mine used to say that sales solve all problems and then later he modified it to growth solves all problems it's not entirely true but it is the tail end of that is really valuable and so if you stop worrying about that to go fix other problems the issue is as soon as you stop growing you get a lot more problems and so you have to figure out a way where you may be you know take 10% of your bandwidth off of worrying about growth to work to solve these other problems but not 50 or certainly a hundred percent because the this is another reason while having employees or is a problem um the like employees can sense a change momentum in the startup faster than the founders can usually and and you just like the prime directive of running a startup is never lose momentum and it's so easy to do that after like you know it's like tough like when you start a startup you're signing up you know you are signing up to like work all out for ten years and that's just really that's really hard like you never you know you can like go on vacation but you never get to stop thinking about your company um you can you know like go hang out with your friends but you never get something about your company there there are new crises at every stage and they only get worse with time so it's just like that's really hard to sign up for um one of the other ideas you put it on posters that idea of fake work yeah keep up with that um the short version of this is like if you imagine a movie about startups actually we can do a more real example if you watch there's a reality TV show going on about startups right now it's horrible but if you think about the sorts of things that would make it into a reality TV show about startups the things that would make for good TV do none of those and do the kind of work that would get caught on the editing room floor which is you know sitting in front of your computer or at your lab bench building your product going off and like talking to your users and saying how can I make this better and that that sort of work makes for a very boring TV is very boring to watch them write code for 12 hours in a day is very boring to watch user interviews is very boring to watch sales meetings um it is much more fun to like watch whatever they put in these movies in these reality TV shows but that is not actually how you win it may make it feel like you're winning it's very fun you know some founders find that they really love fundraising because it's sort of like you get to manipulate people it's very high-stakes feels important um but you know like fundraising while sometimes necessary like no company has ever become great because they were great at fundraising you know at some point you either build a great product that users really love and you figure out a way to grow or you don't and many founders that we come across that we don't end up working with they're great at everything except this and they spend all their time on everything except this so they choose the best lawyer in the world they have a beautiful logo hahaha but but they never make something that people love right and you can get everything else right and you can fail at that and you will fail yeah when I made the point last week that our Tuesday that read is better than anybody know it triaging I mean he has an above the water below on he does not give about the stuff below the line it's just above the line he'll pay attention to all of it all the time but below the lines just doesn't matter yet to the hell that fires burn a little bit yeah you have that you need to trade off getting the big things really right and and be willing to let all of the little things be a little bit wrong yeah you have a question different founders fall in love with different areas so hard to give a general answer the visible example that you can see as an outsider is founders that like fall in love with their public image in the press you know people that really like care about getting on like the 30 under 30 lists or like going to the conferences or whatever um so that's a big thing um another actually it's just like going to networking events you sort of somehow think in the abstract sense these are going to help you I fell victim to this briefly you know like because all like investors have these like CEO conferences no you got to calm it's great it's going to be really fun you're gonna meet the other portfolio CEOs this that the other okay and then you know you get invited to like you know like Sun Valley and it sounds like really great it is cool um and you know you're like oh it's only five days I'll go do it and then like you talk to these founders and you're like you were out of the office more days than we're in the office you know in networking events and when you say to them they're it's obvious then that like oh yeah that probably isn't great but it just sort of you get there gradually and you get away from the things that actually matter so that's that's a common one okay so what are some let's see we talked about a bunch of these things anything we touch on a lot of these things so um what are the some of the what are some of the things you see your best founders screw up frequently um the number one mistake that great founders make and everyone in this room that becomes a great founder is going to make this mistake I'm just gonna mention it I think it's unavoidable is waiting too long to fire bad people um I don't actually think this is a teachable lesson I think you just have to make the mistake in Lund it but it is the universal biggest mistake that otherwise really great founders make and why do you think it takes why does that happen I mean firing people is like the worst part of running a company so it's just it's like it sucks right it's you made a mistake and now you have to like really negatively impact someone's life so I'd actually worry if there was someone who had an easy time firing people yeah my my reflection I was sort of hard people in both in both contexts where I was CEO is that you start saying well this person is not succeeding but maybe it's my fault so maybe I made a bad call on the hire but now it's my responsibility to fix it and so maybe if I invest a little more if I helped him a little more or maybe if I created when context you can fix it I think that good founders tend to think they can fix things people issues like that are tough the one thing I've learned that may be helpful here is that you actually hurt the employee more by keeping them in a position for longer you know if you fire someone two or three months in they never put it on their resume it's just like it's a that never happened you know if they worked there for like a year and don't Excel and then you have to fire them it actually it hurts some more yep and they know to I mean when they're not succeeding they know it let's shift over for just a second so machine intelligence yeah so Sam is very very outspoken everybody should read Sam's blog it's a very very interesting and abroad that is actually not true I my honest advice it was started as a thing for me to like practice writing and then um you should recess bought the uh even write about regulating and sort of directing a I but I don't talk about that so much as what do you think the interesting opportunities are around machine machine I think in the short term there are all these vertical machine learning companies that are doing incredible job at optimizing far better than humans can some particular industry and I think now you're being you're seeing this you know get extended to robotics computer security trading lots of other things so I think we will have a you know ten years in the Sun of sort of wonderful domain wins where machine learning in particular vertical um has great results and then someday someone is going to discover the algorithm behind actual intelligence and creativity and that's gonna go one of two ways and so you talk about vertical AI I'm gonna try to avoid it I think that's a good thing to talk about but I think not as germane to that class it's all vertically I you think there are horizontal things that people should work on now there are opportunities yeah I mean people like a lot of people are trying to develop the first sort of superhuman general intelligence so yes I think that's a cool thing to work on hopefully um yeah I do think people should work on that um let's talk about areas beyond just consumer and enterprise that you're interested in one that you're not aged you don't seem particularly at it is Bitcoin you wanna talk about what you think I don't actually know where this like myth that I'm a Bitcoin skeptic came from um why do you think you said you I think you tell offices you haven't seen we said well what what I had thing I get in trouble for is like whenever I'm asked publicly if people should buy Bitcoin I say no which has been the right prediction it's gone down after every time I said that someday I believe it could work and like if I think so then I will change my advice on whether or not you should speculate on Bitcoin um but I think that if we go back to this metric of you need some users that love something how many people in this class have ever bought something with Bitcoin at all and how many of you have done it more than five times and how many of you have done it is a daily habit at this point that is the entire problem with their coin no compelling you know if people don't love it it does not become part of people's daily lives in the way that they're really successful companies always have to it may it might I hope it does I think it's cool um and I I I believe that you know I believe that it has the makings of something that could be huge and I think it's interesting people to work on mmm what I what I have said is I wouldn't go buy a bunch of Bitcoin right now because I don't think it has yet found product market fit and I also don't have estin startups that I don't think have yet found product product market beyond the YC stage so that's all like I just think it needs users who really love it right now the only people that really love Bitcoin are the people that are expecting to get rich on it because they bought their coins early I'm not sure that's quite right I think there's a lot of computer scientists you think it's a pretty amazing president blockchain is an amazing technology but that this idea like even those people don't say well we're gonna buy everything the Bitcoin they just say that this idea of a distributed ledger is awesome which that I a hundred percent agree with me too yeah yeah big hoards of commodities a little bit terrifying right now um talk about uh Helion a new power sure why you why you kind of all those are the only to configure the chairman up right yeah yeah um um why hate being on boards so I try not to do that um it's a lot of working a little bit boring I got trapped on the red board so I'm also on that one but that was not intentional the the I think if you could pick one thing to do that would help the poorest half of the world the most tomorrow you would pick friendly superhuman intelligence machine intelligence and God be choice one um I think the second thing that you could do would be really cheap safe clean energy I think if you look historically the quality of life and the cost of energy correlate almost perfectly through time and and every time the cost of energy comes down a lot the quality of life for people especially like the poorest people in the world it it really goes up a lot so I think the problem of solving energy is so important and that this leaves out you know all the climate change issues all of the wars but like basically I just made a list once of like the problems that I cared about and I thought about the the the underlying issue and you know you can do these things like health um economics like war ah you know like war is basically a fought over energy we say they get a lot of other reasons but they get fought over energy yep and so like it's just like you know if you think about the often like people need sort of or I need this like optimistic version of the future and you know a version of the future where where energy is you know a penny a kilowatt hour instead of eight cents a kilowatt hour I think really transforms a lot of these things I care about so you're involved in both these companies they're both both these companies one is a fusion company one is a fishing company I think that there's already a lot of good stuff happening in solar my view of the world is that it will be 80% and 20% of earth-based nuclear and solar I don't know which is which but there's already enough people working on solar and almost no one working on the nuclear side so I thought it was more importantly to focus there yeah the cost cars on solar seem pretty up hit pretty good yeah um okay so if he gets a bump at five thirty s at what you said we're gonna do a few minutes a day well so I have one more question and then maybe we'll open up to a few more questions in the class so my thing is when you turn 30 a few months ago you had a thing and you talked about the days are long but the years are short yeah and which is my favorite saying but I didn't find a thing until I had kids so I find a little 40 now time speeds up even more when you have kids but I believe that given the days along a year too short how do you think what do you what did you mean and then how do you think about your time and urgency now yeah look I think um you know when I was 19 and when I when I dropped out of college I sort of felt like I had infinite time and I the only kind of and someone said to me when I was maybe like 23 that um the intensity that you need to like work at a startup you can't keep that up forever maybe you have like 20 years of your life where you can like work as intensely as you need to to make you know it to be a great startup CEO and you know you can do that from 22 to 42 you can do that from 28 to 48 whatever but um if you believe that then you have a limited number of sort of shots on goal and the the biggest thing to think about then is just sort of opportunity cost you know like if I'm going to start the startup it's going to take two years if it fails three years if it fails or ten years of its successful um and I have you know what is actually an incredibly short window of how long I can like be a great startup CEO I think I actually worked like too hard on my first startup and got to burned out and thus like the thought of doing another one now is just sort of terrifying to me um but you know I think the mistake is to think of life as 100 years long and to think about like when you're thinking about what to work on and think that you know I have this 20 or 30 year period in which I will concentrate a huge amount of the output of my professional life and that's actually not very long that's a small number of startups and you know what what do I believe in the most you know what what do I think is the most important way I contribute to the world that I'm going to find most satisfying odds momentum or not yes excellent excellent advice um questions for Sam you have a bunch so what are we start back here and you just need to tell me when you need to go sure um how do you fire people especially if they're your friends the I think the most important thing about this is like put yourself in the other person's shoes treat them like a human and do anything you possibly can to make it look like a win for them so you know I never I never liked every person I've ever fired I have found them a job before I fired like I sat down with him I told him I'm gonna do this and then I found them a job before they left my company so when they left they announced that they were resigning and they announced their new job and it looked like that and and you know we would celebrate them on the way out again I feel like if I hired the person then I screwed up even if they didn't work out and so you know I sit them down and you say like look I'm this feels terrible this is honestly the worst part of my job this just isn't working and I don't think it's in the interest for you to be here either um I I really appreciate you as a person if you don't like like if they've done something unethical then it's a different scenario but in most of these cases it's like I really appreciate you as a person I really value our friendship I know this is going to be rocky for us but I'm sure you know years from now we'll laugh about this and be close friends again but you know this isn't working and almost always they also will think it's not working and then you say but like look I want to do this I realize this sucks I realize this up ends your life I want to do this in the best possible way for you so you know um eh I'm going to be super generous with severance and I always am B you know I'm going to help you find a job and see either you keep working here while you look for your job or if it's really not working you know you go work at home for a while but you still act like it you know we still say you're here until you're ready on your terms to announce that you're leaving and what you're doing and what I have found is if you just you know treat people with respect and you make it clear that you're firm on the decision it's definitely happening but you're going to do anything you can to make it smooth for them and be respectful to them they'll work with you and they'll say okay let's figure out let's figure out how to do this and I think people really preciate that what Stan said at the end about being firm on your decision is super important if you come in saying I'm I'm not sure I'm thinking about this it turns into a pretty complicated power dynamic very very quickly which almost never goes well what what sam says is if you're clear and you're firm then they have to process very quickly they're in a new situation and then you're constructed then then you are constructive together the advice and the management books is that you know you have like their last paycheck ready to go and you have their termination letter you have a bunch of legal documents for them to sign that you present in a meeting and if you do that that actually is horrible advice I think you know if you do that it's what the lawyers tell you what the lawyers tell you is usually bad advice but it's particularly bad in this case because it makes the person feel like it's a very adversarial thing and it's happening on your terms what you want them to think is that this is going to happen I've decided this is going to happen but I want to hear the terms you want to happen on and I want to hear how we sort of position this to the company to your next job to everything else you know in the best way for you and if you sit down and say and your firm this is going to happen but you talk about how can I help you have this happen in the best way well we'll sort out the paperwork later it just makes the whole thing feel not adversarial sure we last guys we talked about comes the specialist going from the generous especially have you seen your founders adapt a transition as they get the different goals for amazing show starts um I think that the best founders are generalists all the way through I think that actually like ah you know the maybe you're like a specialist in a particular technology that you develop but as soon as you become a company as soon as you're no longer in product development and it when you transition from building a product of building a company you got to be you got to specialize in generalization starting that day and never look back so you talked a lot about you wanted to make it interesting and so I'm wondering how through things that you did eventually and in your work at YC we can work towards sort of changing this culture of tech from Dali things like uber for pizza attributes and things that are actually going to make a positive difference for people outside I always think the best way to do these things is just to go off and do them you know we want to fund more companies like that we can either go talk about it and talk about how do we do this or we can just say you know what we're doing this and fund a lot more companies that do that and we've just been doing that the bad part is they don't get nearly as much press so externally - I see you don't see it as much um but we we we're super fortunate all the partners of ICD made plenty of money you know and so at this point like we want to work with the things we want to spend our timeline and so the answer of how we found more companies like that is just that we fund more companies like that and we just said you know this is important to us and we're going to do it the good news is it's worked phenomenally well it's worked over the last couple of years like far better than I've ever imagined um you know two years ago we've funded zero biotech companies I think now we found it like 30 um we have funded now you know companies that target their products to every area of the world you know different people and again I think the answer is just say okay we're going to do this okay maybe two more questions in the back are your cons about how many Asian preferences you might be pushing off evaluations employees giving you is a billion dollar companies at a/yc you're 59 across the world all butcher in the valley you see fundraising becoming a distraction you ever counsel I know you're early stage but you haven't counseled your startups and not take money think it's getting too hot we do all the time and we always tell startups not to go after the highest deal and sometimes we say don't raise the money at all you know the only time that I think you need to consider whether a start-up is overpriced is when you are buying equity in that startup and that happens two times one when you're investing in two when you're going to join as an employee and getting stock options so that's when I really think about how much a start-up is actually worth other than that I think the valuation numbers are complete fictions totally irrelevant and I just don't pay any attention the you know like the intermediate the intermediate valuations mean nothing like all we all I care about is how much the equity is worth like once I can trade it you know which hopefully is not for many many years um it's frustrating because you know the press like all the way I ever get asked from journalists is like oh how much are the YC companies worth and what I say is like ma no no it depends what they're worth when they exit the intermediate numbers meaningless they're why I need a number so people get very focused on this but I think you should just ignore it and the important time to ignore it when you're going to work at that you know startup it's worth more than a billion dollars in your head don't believe it's worth a billion dollars because yes someone did invest with this liquidation preference that makes the sticker valuation meaningless so what I think about these numbers is they don't mean anything as an investor you know I probably won't invest it most of these prices as an employee you should not let the founders of that company or whoever is hiring you at that company convince you that your equity is worth X percent of the headline valuation um because it's not and that's when it's important to think about and then you really have to determine like the question of when you're joining a start-up is not how much does a start-up worth today it's how much do I believe this startup will be worth in five years and what is my ownership percentage of that but totally throughout the intermediate valuation okay one more question would you recommend that we actually started startup to do that or join well not for the sake of starting startup I wouldn't recommend that no matter what if you have an idea that you think will really matter to the world and you think a start-up is the best way to get that idea out into the world which I think it often is then you should start that startup if you're starting to startup for the sake of starting a startup that will usually end in heartache and I wouldn't do that um but you know I think joining a company that you really believe in and it is early enough you can really contribute to I think the expected value of that is higher than starting a startup because so few startups going to be really successful um Dustin Moskovitz gave a talk in my class last year about this very topic and I refer people to all the time I think he actually like has a really great framework for thinking through that particular trade off those one of the first one in the first class yeah yep uh so we should renew one more one more question so what difference do I oh um what difference do I see in founders should spend more time in school uh I don't think it actually correlates much either way we've had success with founders that didn't go to college at all that dropped out that one's got PhDs I think if anything like the extremes of like anything are bad and so people that go to like you know fourteen years of school maybe those people aren't just like fast movers enough and people that don't go to any school I think like I would have missed out on stuff had I not done some college on but within the kind of normal bounds I don't think there's any big difference there's a lot of difference in how you want to live your life and how you got to think about what kind of person you want to be startups I think it's not I agree it's not correlated at all anything else you want to say to it thanks for having me you've been awesome yeah

Channel: Greylock

Views: 132,652

Rating: 4.8870058 out of 5

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Id: CxKXJWf-WMg

Length: 72min 25sec (4345 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2015