Marc Andreessen at Startup School SV 2016

we have a fireside chat with Marc Andreessen come on out Marc I think he's right back there they know who you are no introductions needed so thanks for coming back this is your third startup school and I think maybe you're the only person who's been on stage both as a founder and now as an investor so I won't go through your history but what I'd like you to kind of talk us through is how you came to the decision after starting a bunch of tech companies to become an investor there are a lot of venture funds that exist so why and how is a 16z different yeah so the big thing we we came up Ben and I came up in the 90s in the industry and at that point ventric is the good news is venture capital and professionalized and so yeah these great venture firms kleiner perkins and benchmark and Sequoia and others that have gotten really good at what they did part of the professionalization was they had tilted very strongly away from founder CEOs and towards professional CEOs and there were good reasons for that that we can discuss but our view the industry is that not all but many of the best companies in the industry are run by their founders for a long period of time so IBM run by the Watson to Watson's actually father and son Gila Packard run by Hewlett Packard for 50 years many other you know many other examples Microsoft Oracle many others and so the the model had just kind of drifted away from that and the kind of default move became bringing the professional CEO what do you mean by professional CEO professional CEO so the the the basic thing is well there was what they would say is what they would say which is what they said to us at one point which is oh so what are you guys going to hire a real CEO and so you know the sort of the general version of that answer the the specific thing would when they say professional CEO generally they talk about somebody with a lot of business in a particular sales experience so somebody who's very comfortable with taking something you know taking something that somebody has built engineers have built in the lab and then taking it out into the world and so it's everything raising money marketing sales finance you know all organization management all the things involved in building the business and the company around the product and so we just have you know we they have this idea that if it would sort of want to tilt things back a little bit now we're not religious about the founder CEO and there are a lot of founders who don't actually want to be the CEO or want to partner with a great CEO and then there are also founders who can't be the CEO and so you know they're sort of know as I say there's no concept of CEO tenure right CEO is not a guaranteed position like you do have to perform it if you don't perform by the way it's not the VCS that are your problem is that your company collapses and so you know it is important perform but we did believe in the generalized model that founders are really important and the founder CEO is a good model when you can have it and so well it's just what we observed was there was not at that point of venture capital firm that really had a it had developed an operating model around how to do that and so we decided to start our firm and then we decided to really bear down on two things just been our big areas of focus for the last seven years so one is all of our general partners have built and run companies before and so we like to talk about the importance of having people on your board who have been through the struggle been in in his book the hard thing about hard things he talks about the struggle being just all the stuff that goes wrong when you're trying to accomplish something big I call it the ship he's more polite than I am but it's just all the stuff that happens and you know we could talk for hour hours about that but to have somebody in your board who's really been through it and so all of our all of our GPS by definition fit that criteria the other thing that we did and this is a huge part of the firm for us today is we built a whole operating model around basically we call it giving the founders superpowers basically the equivalent capability give a founder who's not operated in business before the ability to operate like a professional CEO would be able to if they just walked in the door and a lot of that has to do with network and so the network of all the customers that you're going to sell to the network to off all the later round investors you're gonna raise money from the network of all the big industry companies you have to work with the network of all the reporters that you want you know to get your story out the network of all the engineers that you need to recruit the network of all the executives but you need to recruit the network of all the regulators and policy makers that you need to deal with in a lot of these businesses and so we now have 85 full-time professionals in the firm that build and run these very large networks on behalf of the portfolio and so a founder works with us Jeff Jeff woo the founder you're about to describe to this you plug into the matrix you just kind of instantaneously get this up rate as a new CEO or even a even an experience that you just give this big upgrade where all of a sudden you're plugged into the world at scale and that and that's working pretty well did did you think about this back in 2006 2007 before the firm started that evolved as you as you kind of build out the firm yes that's all evolved and we've we've had you know a whole bunch of people join the firm that have helped us figure this out and that run all these run all these all these all these teams and networks for us that have really helped us helps us advance our thinking but the the core idea was there you know yeah sort of a 16z was a start-up and you know having done startups before we were we were big fans of thinking it through and having a differentiated strategy and so we spent about a year-and-a-half planning this out before we started the firm and these ideas were at the core of it so a lot of first-time founders in the audience and kind of raising money as we just did kind of pitch practice here is a little bit of a black box what is the just very precise way that you know it's a process that you use to work with companies how do they get a hold of you and what actually happens after the first email yeah so I would really separate fundraising and this has got a lot more complicated than last few years in good ways I would separate fundraising a fundraising from angels seed investors accelerators you know sort of accelerator rounds precede rounds seed rounds seed extension rounds post seed rounds I put all those in one bucket and and there and that's a you know that's a process that the the y c YC plugs you into and demo day is organized around that and in your you know your friends who have had a startup hole will have been through that and so there's there's there's a whole art to that and that's that's a lot of what what what gets talked about then there comes a time when you engage in a different kind of fundraise and and what I would call it institutional fundraise and I think that really starts with a formal series a or anything equivalent to a formal series I it also applies by the way if you're going to go try to raise money from you know the corporate of estor or whatever it's an institutional process you're dealing with somebody who's running a highly professionalized firm you know with real fiduciary responsibilities back to their LPS you know the their firm you know a lot of venture firms been in business for 30 40 50 years there's there's a way of doing things and things just get more formal and so I think that that's the first really important thing to think about and you know when we were actually schizophrenic on this because we do a lot of the seed at the seed level and we invested the seed level it's a lot like dealing with any other seed investor it's you know are you smart you have a really good idea to have a great deck and let's see how it goes but when it's a 5 or 10 or 15 million dollar a round or B round then things get more serious and so when you means here so let's say I am raising that 10 million dollar a round and I get to give you an email and say hey and then I come in and what happens is it's just a series of meetings and then diligence and then you have a big check like in those game shows show up at your house when you're least expecting it so really really press the spouses so so the first thing is how do you actually get get in and so there's there's this there's actually an argument that kind of plays out on this topic in the valley which is the importance of what are called warm referrals or warm introductions and so the way that most of the top end venture capital firms work is basically they'll take you seriously if you come in introduced by somebody they've worked with before and they won't take you seriously if you don't and there's an argument that plays out the valley which is at that sort of unfair and unreasonable and you know what about all these you know you guys talked about all these founders all over the world and like why can't they have access the way the people who are already connected can the argument in favor of the warm referral is that it's it's the first test and it's the first test of the ability to basically network your way to the investor and basically the way the investor thinks about it is if you can't figure out a way to network your way to a VC firm which is of course in the business of meeting founders then you're unlikely to be able to network your way into hiring a great team or network your way into selling your product to customers and so actually I think I think that the role the warm referral is is is is misinterpreted I think did you see it as like it's the first test and so I think it's a test you just want to pass you don't want to take any chances on that the good news is if you're connected to I see if you're connected into the valley angel seed ecosystem that's a very easy test to pass if you're not connected into YC then you know the thing to do is to get to the valley right or get into the network and get it you know get into icy luck if you're not into connected to YC yeah likewise if I see that YC has been a huge like YC has really widen the after for founder's to be able to plug into this process and I think in a very healthy way and so that works really well so that's the first is the warm referral then there's two theories one is going high the other is going low and you know so one theory is in you'll hear that sometimes is you know only ever talked to senior partners at the firms and don't waste any time with the more junior partners the younger people in the firm because they can't make the decision pull the trigger the counter-argument is that the senior partners at these firms make very little very few decisions from scratch the senior partners only get to investment a few companies a year each and they make very few of those decisions if they're going to make a decision on their own without any work done by the junior people in the firm it's probably going to be somebody they've already worked with before so it's actually really hard from a sort of standing start to get just a straight yes from a senior partner so the thing that works better than the thing that I would do if I were you know 20 to 25 again but I think there's a huge advantage to coming in with with with junior people and get networked into the firm and spend a lot of time with the junior people understanding number one just like preflighting like how is this coming across like how is this going to be received because they you know they can read the minds of the senior partners they can tell you how these things are going to get received and they can help you and then also you know we frankly the senior partners at a firm like ours look to the younger people a lot of like okay like what's interesting and we count on the younger people to stay very connected especially to the the first-time founders and so I really encourage people to actually take take the younger people in these firms seriously so from that usually the process is a first meeting with one of one of the one of those folks which might then lead to a second meeting with a broader group of those folks maybe with one or two general partners so you kind of have this kind of wind-up kind of period and you're kind of working through it and we're talking about days weeks months you know it depends in a hot environment it's you know days two weeks because you as a VC you assume that deals go down relatively quickly like in in the you know for the last several years I think days two weeks has been the expectation I will tell you in the cold environments you know in 2003 you know we're talking six months nine months 12 months right VCS had nothing but time because you know so hard for anybody to raise money for anything you could just let these these these things play out for a long time but these days at stake is days to weeks we try to move in days to a small number of weeks then the the big event is to then progress through you know one or two or three meetings and then and then the the way you really know you're making progress is if you get invited to present to the full partnership and that's usually at most firms in Monday Monday meeting and that's a formal like that's a full-on formal and that's like all the general partners at the firm are there like the whole firm is there well well have like sometimes we'll have 40 people in the room for that people come in and like presenting to the army but like we get everybody then the founder actually just presents their company yeah yeah it's a presentation and so then this gets in another debate which is like okay you know you smart guys like you go on and on about like creativity all this stuff why do you want the founder to stand up there like you know like an idiot for you know 15 minutes reading off the PowerPoint slides you know like why don't we just like why don't we have a conversation why don't we do things casual why don't we like you know why didn't you do more research upfront like why do we do this formal presentation and again I think again I think that's misinterpreted I think the formal presentation is another test which is as a founder if you're not good enough at your job as a CEO to get up and present to an institutional investor for 60 minutes and sell them on your thing like we're easy like this is the thing I think message about these VC firms exists to give up money like like we're like we're in the bit like we love when somebody walks in has a compelling pitch and we can give them a check like that's a successful day for us in contrast every other pitch you're ever going to make it's going to be to somebody who's going to be much worse than us right like so customers we're either gonna be like you know no I'm not going to give you any money like is their default position right you know engineers you're going to try to recruit engineers and they've got twenty other job offers right and so why is your pitch going to be so much better than the other 20 startups right and so again I just I've you that it's like that's the second big test which is can you successfully execute a formal pitch and then if that goes well then generally you go and do you know there's there if it's like super super smoking hot you could you could move to treat very quickly after that usually it's a week or two of additional work to kind of have some more discussions various people follow up you kind of get into the process of you know the venture firm really trying to make sure they understand what you do you start to negotiate the term sheet and then at some point you have a term sheet discussion and somebody checks you write a year so we see two thousand startups a year that are warm referrals and we can say yes for at the institutional level for A's or B's we can say yes to about twenty and we're a pretty high scale firm you know we're eight nine general partners and we're and we're up in you know large fund size and so we we operate at scale there are other top-end firms that will say yes three or four or five times a year and so by the way like on the one hand that's very daunting which is like well you know like that's 1% right it's 1% of warm referrals basically and so that seems very daunting I could just tell you on the other hand goes back to this concept of the tests like it's not that hard to get good at this part like and so I just I think it's worth the time to really understand and get good at how to how to how to get networked in and how to make that pitch because if you good at that then like I said when it comes time to go sell your product to a customer when it comes time to go hire somebody those same skills reapply in the exact same way and I think people people should just people should just founder should just get good at that so uh there's a pretty big you know gap between kind of an average engineer and a really great engineer and there's ways to test that uh how do you know an investor is actually good if you're a founder and you're raising money for the first time or you know you haven't raised much money so I think I have I think there's five key ways that a founder can know whether an investor is good and they are references references references references and references Elizabeth third one the references yeah references are really important so the good the good news with the valleys of super networks as a consequence of that you know words people know I'm a founder and I you know I'm going to seed fund B what does it mean to do a reference yeah look I just find people too invested before or yeah I mean that so there's sort of two different kinds of references or so called front door references which is you just you ask me like you know who should I talk to and I'll give you a list of people who I hopefully know will say good things about me sometimes I'm wrong then there's the back door references right which which is which is which is usually where the the value is which is people who have worked with the investor before other entrepreneurs or people who have been at companies that that investor has funded or by the way for that matter other investors right you can you can reference like the way a lot of VCs get reference tractors with you know the angels and so your angel investors your seed investors if you're in YC the YC partners other YC founders the internet twitter you know these discussions take place you know all over the place now so so I think you just you tried it's just like anything else when you're evaluating people as you just try to get to other people have worked with them in the past again I think that's a general skill I think that's a good thing to know how to do because if you can reference check an investor it also means you can reference check a candidate yeah right which is really critically important I will just tell you like in the valley like in the valley like there is a way to hire great people and it involves references references references you just everybody is good highway should one list let's say no first reference check what should I listen to that is like the double-talk of this is not a good investor this is not a good oh yeah yeah so it's all in it's all in the little tells right so it's all in the like if somebody's good they're like enthusiastic they're going to be pounding the table like this this verse is great you should take their money like if you get them on their board your you know your board you're lucky if you get anything other than that right that's like uh like trouble right and it's it's like the silences like you know so what's a person like a board meetings and then there's like the silence then there's like the breath like you know and it's like okay great trouble you know here we here we come or you know the other thing is that you know a lot of people don't want to say bad things about people even even though nobody else is listening and so they'll say these lukewarm every my favorite is like well they're very punctual right sharp socks always on time right very well-dressed you know always brought doughnuts yeah and so you just you got to look at your even further back door was the front door reference in a sense what you listen for but though the macro reference is even still that's what you listen for and even when it's people who you know really well they still may not actually tell you the full thing and so you just you just want to test really carefully I just think it's a it's an incredible useful skill if you learn how to do it you can basically test this out on investors and then and then when it when it does matter for investors but then what it also really matters is when you're hiring especially executives later on so I step back a little bit lots of founders investors look up to you and your ideas who do you look up to and how do you make sure your ideas are actually like continue to be good yeah so um so I'm a big fan of history so there's a sort of a classic cliché in the valley which is like we don't respect history very much and a lot of people who visit the valley for the first time that's their impression because they people have they've had this I have this experience first in the valley it's like I want to okay I want to see Silicon Valley want to drive around and see Silicon Valley and it's like good luck with that right like okay there's a freeway there's a strip mall there's there's an office park there's a security guard who won't let me in the office park like there's no physical history here right really and then and then in the conversations I mean we're all about the future like we're building the future and so I think there's his natural tendency to assume that the past isn't very relevant and I actually think actually criticized a little bit you know there's sort of the Elon school of thought now which is very strong in the valley which is sort of think everything through from first principles which has its huge strengths for sure but it does kind of dismiss the idea that people who came before us had anything to teach us and my general view is the people who came before us had a harder time doing what they did than we do because the world was in a more immature state like they didn't have all the they didn't necessarily you know start up started before 50 years ago they didn't have ventured capital right they didn't have there's a lot of things that start over 20 years ago didn't have the internet things were harder in the past and so the people who were successful in the past I think were often better than we are because they had to be because it was harder and so I like going in the past in the tech industry and I'll just I recommend a few books so I think they're the origin stories of companies IBM there's a fantastic book about Thomas Watson senior who built a BM by Kevin Mamie and if you think that Steve Jobs is rough or was rough on people he had nothing on Thomas Watson senior their stuff the book is and the book has transcripts and executive staff meetings at IBM in the 1930s and 1840s and let's just say he was at absolute terror and built an extraordinary company and so he's a real role model not tear apart be careful how this is all interpreted bill Hewlett and Dave Packard Michael Malone wrote a great book called bill and Dave talks about how HP got built over the course of 30 or 40 years by Bill and Dave and then I like going back further so I like Edison I like what was called the Second Industrial Revolution a lot where like you got electricity and you got a car so there's a great Edison book called The Wizard of Menlo Park it's really good there's a great Ford book called I invented the modern age and if you go back and read the history of cars 100 years ago Detroit a hundred years ago was a lot like so it was a lot more like Silicon Valley today than I think people people who don't understand in fact Henry Henry Ford like 400 company was not his first company right so there's there's there's all these very interesting backstories and then I think you can go back even further I like going back and this is not to compare you know us to this but just as inspiration and role models Florence you know with the time of the Medici Leonardo DaVinci I just got this great book called da Vinci's robots and it turns out da Vinci while he was doing everything else that he did in life he was also designing robots and in his you know sketchbooks there are fully fledged designs for like everything on mechanical you know all the Boston Dynamics he was like training invent all that stuff five hundred years ago didn't quite have the you know didn't quite have the technology to be able to pull it off couldn't quite you know go to couldn't go to Ti and get the microcontroller so he had some issues but you know he's an inspiration there's another great book called the lunar man about something called the Lunar Society which was in England about 250 years ago like James Watt invented the steam engine and all these other guys who were doing this kind of thing back then all work together is kind of they had kind of a YCA thing back then and so and it's all basically it's just you know what it is you're trying to look for okay the world is you know the points in time the world is the way it is everybody takes it for granted and then there's a person or some set of usually a set of people who think no no there's a better and you know different and better way to do things and then just all the practical challenges involved and causing that kind of change to happen and trying to build you know whether it's a new company you're trying to build a new movement of some kind or a new kind of art and I think there's all kinds of lessons to be drawn from all that and you extract ideas from those those people or because there is I think one of the one of the problems of being in about in the valley is there's just such an echo chamber of opinions for every opinion there is a counter opinion which is just as loudly and aggressively drummed how do you how do you separate what is actually good advice and what is not good advice as a founder yeah we used to go back and I guess what I drove in straight is like it's always hard and so just like Henry Ford as an example like there was nothing easy about building Ford Motor Company or Thomas Edison there was nothing easy about electricity like electricity I'm I talked about like you would think that that would be a relatively easy thing to get people to want and it turns out there was actually a lot of effort and work involved in getting people to think that was a good idea and so uh it's just it's it's it's so it's that goes back to Ben's idea of the struggle it's just there is so much work and effort involved there's so many false starts so there are so many things that can go wrong and I think you draw on all the different lessons and theories from then and now and you kind of view them as a mental toolkit to draw on but I guess I would say one of our beliefs the Ben also talks about his book as there's there's no silver bullet like there's the temptation when you get kind of in in the is always like there's got to be a way out of this and it's got to be one thing if there's got to be some idea or to your point some piece of advice right or some way to reframe you know if I could just refrain to pitch this way or if I could just hire this person or just get this customer or something you know it's going to fix everything and we always like to say there are no silver bullets they're only LED bullets and so you just have to kind of do all the work and most of the work is just a grinding is just you know grinding labor and there's just no substitute for it and I think that frankly I think that comes out of the history as well so what do you think is you know we're kind of heading in the tail end of 2016 what what's in store in the next couple of two years two and a half years for the startup ecosystem and these there's been a lot of talk and a lot of different opinions about both in verticals and where verticals are going in just the larger community in the ecosystem yeah so I guess you know maybe two to two schools of thought so as you're all probably well aware experts have been declaring an imminent bubble and crash continuously since 2004 so we're now in year 13 next year will be year 14 of declarations of an imminent com crash Redux all over again they are these the people who predict this are getting increasingly frustrated that it hasn't happened and increasingly irate that we're all still here you know maybe they're right and we've just you know completely reinflates you know combo bowl 2.0 and we're just it's just a now we're just delaying until the inevitable crash it's possible you know these seem skeptical and skeptical of it because the other the other the other theory right so the other theory is we've we've entered a phase of the industry where you know some things are just working now and in particular right the internet is working now which if you were here 20 years ago that was not necessarily a certain thing and like the internet works mobile works the smartphone works you know God will be the new Apple headphones will work you know some stuff is just starting to work and so you've got these marvelous you know you've got this young giant install base now people all over the world on the internet you've got a brute you know this massive growing consumer acceptance of e-commerce you've got these giant new social platforms you've got these you know all these new these new playbooks or how to build these companies you've got the rise you know developer adoption of enterprise technology is like a whole thing that's working now and so these things are working at very big scale and and each of these things that the big things that work are all platforms to build on top of right there they're they're opportunities for more things to then get built that right on top and so I just think a lot of those things are working really well so which isn't to say that everything is working right and so I think the the valley and startups will always be characterized by you know there will always be what's you know called a power-law curve where you'll always have some big successes and then you'll have a long tail of things that don't work and you'll have a bunch of stuff in the middle and so you always get this kind of distribution of success but you have enough things that are working at scale that are serious and so you know I think the things that are working are working really really well what do you think in terms of or do you believe in this kind of thematic or these three or four markets or these three or four spaces in the next couple of years are really going to be most likely the places where some of these outlying returns are going to sit or do are you more agnostic yeah we're totally schizophrenic on that point so anybody in the field can't resist talking about this all the time and by the way there is substance to it right it's like there was there was a point at which you know there was a point between you know when the iPhone came out to probably 2012 was like there's this point where all the mobile killer apps that were going to be on the home screen of the iPhone were going to get built and by the way got built there was a point where you know early earlier there's a point when the PC came out that all the PC killer apps are going to get built so there are these things that happen these new platforms get established and then and then there's this period of time where things get built on top there's a bunch of candidates for that today that are very exciting so broadly I get a few examples AI machine learning deep learning as one cluster of things very tons of activity happening there intersection of biology healthcare and computer science big cluster things happening there transportation right autonomous ground vehicles air vehicles actually now see vehicles of different kinds different sizes shapes descriptions uses are really starting to click and you know we could probably name another another half-dozen so you know and and we you know what part of our job is to track track those those fields and try to try to figure out the best new startups are you guys actually track those fields oh just it's just a constant it's just the kind of the action of the firm the flow of the firm so it's just constantly trying to review trying to understand I'm trying to map the landscape trying to understand all the companies trying to meet all the founders so that's the one and I would just say on the other hand on the other hand I would say that I don't think any VC really does that could a job predicting these things in the sense of you first of all it's so the big successes are so dependent on the specifics they're contingent on the specifics and so it's the right child here with the right idea with the right team with the right breakthrough at the right time and the right market with the right you know pricing model it's all these things have to come together and you just you never my experiences you just never know when that when that company is going to crystallize and it often happens five or ten years after you think it should and then it can often be the case that you get these companies that are breakthrough companies and fields that people thought were dead so we had just an example have the company attained iam that's people written about now which is a it's a security company and it's in a field where I think a lot of VCs thought that the opportunity to build big franchises was over and like this company is growing like unbelievably fast very but very specific set of people who really understand the problem and you know became available of a certain point to go after it they're going after it you know VMware is another great example virtualization VMware popularized virtualization virtualization was a 30 year old mainframe technology it goes back to the 1960s and Diane Greene and Mendel rosenbloom out of Stanford middle of Stanford and Diane out a son started VMware in 1999 at a time when everybody knew that like enterprise software was on its way out and it turned into one of the big breakthroughs Google highlights like Google was like the 35th search engine right it was like 34 other search engines had come along and like we all knew for a fact that number one search didn't work like it would give you crappy results number two there was no way to make money on it like those two things we knew for sure how Dino's a founder that you're not too early cos you know that we talked to a lot of founders and and how do you know that you're you know 35th rather than maybe first or second that your timing is right so my experience is the great founders almost always feel like they're you almost always feel like you're too late and you're almost always too early and you almost always feel like you're too late the reason is because for you it's become obvious like for all of you you know I've already listening to this like you've got some idea in your head and like as far as you're concerned the world should already work this way which is why you're pursuing it and so to you it's a little bit inexplicable as to why it hasn't happened yet and there must be 80 other people going after the same idea and it must be just about to happen and I must be too late which is by the way just actually how I felt with this guy I was like too late in retrospect we weren't the realities you're almost always too early we almost never see a qualified founder fail because they're too late to market it's almost always because they're too early to market and I think by the way and I don't say that critically I think we make when we screw up investments I think that's often the reason as well I think we're in the exact same boat as the founder in that in that degree which is we believe it's going to happen therefore we invest in it just turn it just turns out the way the history gets written as the world just wasn't ready yet so I always like to point out like the the iPad was like this breakthrough product in 2009 and they were you know Apple oh my god that's all these things well there was this thing called the Newton 20 years earlier in 1989 if you haven't heard of it look it up on Wikipedia it was the iPad 20 years earlier and it was like virtually the same thing and the world just wasn't ready yet the technologies were in place you didn't have mobile broadband you didn't have the high-resolution screens you didn't have the battery technology and you just they brought the thing to market and crash and burn and it convinced people for 20 years the tablet computing would never work and then they did it again and if the iPad and it worked and so I think that in a lot of ways that's the biggest risk that the biggest conceptual risk we all deal with it's just that I think that's the permanent curse of the entrepreneur yeah I remember you you gave a talk at YC one time and you said you know if you the one way to figure out if you're not too late is if what you're working on was being hotly covered three four years ago you're probably right on time because now the infrastructure and consumer behavior is not caught up to what was you know exciting in 2012 2013 last question through through whatever fate or whatever you lose everything and at the end of the day today or 22 years old again what do you start what's the company you would start so if I'm 22 again I think what I do is I go try to find the best the the hottest company the the company in the valley that's growing the fastest and that has a really good culture and a really good foundation for training and so an example that would be an Airbnb but there you know there are many others even by the way still Facebook I would go try to plant myself at a company where I can really learn okay fast forward now you're 25 you've got you've got your three years at Airbnb and what do you start now well so I spend that time so when as I work my butt off just a much a good reputation so that when people reference check me right I reference check well but the other is I spend that time thinking and I really critically I spend that time building my network and the people who I know that I want to work with you know down the road and then and then I either yeah I either come up with an idea I don't but I I would focus much I think it's very hard and I'm deliberately avoiding your question because I think it's very hard to answer in the abstract let me answer in a different way if I were eighteen and I were going to college I would do I would really I would do computer science again in a heartbeat and then I would either focus on cryptocurrency distributed systems and the broad domain of cryptocurrency number one number two a I machine learning deep learning or number three intersection of bio biology and NCS so genomics and synthetic biology I would personally I would do those one of those three areas and the hard part for me would be picking between them because I think they're all they're all right to me it just seems like all three of those are going to have transformative work happen in the next twenty years it's going to change a lot of how the world works awesome thank you for your time thanks everybody you

Channel: Y Combinator

Views: 45,451

Rating: 4.9205775 out of 5

Keywords: YC, Y Combinator

Id: NEOR0AJsziE

Length: 32min 59sec (1979 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2016

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[u/Lite_Coin_Guy]

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