Mosaic Ventures: Fireside chat with Y Combinator President, Sam Altman

so it's a it's a privilege on behalf of Mike and myself from mosaic to welcome sam'l man here he's a man he doesn't need a lot of introduction as he obviously has a very significant persona in the in the startup world is the president of YC but just a very quick sort of highlights you know went to Stanford dropped out did a startup race significant amount of money from some of the best investors in the world sold it successfully and moved on to running YC which is the preeminent accelerator on the west coast and as part of that leadership role you know is taking the business in a number of new vectors not just relating to seed financing companies but many other interesting things that we'll talk about shortly and you know including AI which is an area that my partner Mike has been spending a lot of time on and I think we'd like to get into some detail on but some other very big important and necessary style up areas including energy and what bio synthetic life forms and stuff that startups should be doing so the purpose of this was really a in a smaller group and more intimate group we're doing a larger session upstairs and the bigger theater with proto entrepreneurs later this afternoon but for both YC alums and there's a number I think that Samms recognized who've gone through the program over the last decade as well as some of our peer investors and founders in the London ecosystem to in a more intimate surroundings who have a chance to engage with Sam on some of these important developments in the world of the sort of third industrial third software revolution that the planet is is currently going through and trying to look at those developments with with a bigger picture you know you know with that you know maybe Sam can you tell us a little bit why you're in London and as part of a sort of Whistlestop European tour on this trip and how you see the role of YC not just as a important player in Silicon Valley but over time potentially on the global stage is a good place to start as you introduce sure what you do so we don't view ourselves as a Silicon Valley investor we invest around the world I'd say half of our companies come from outside of California at this point maybe more and we are our goal our mission is just to increase the amount of innovation as much as we can and I think if we limited ourselves to Silicon Valley we would miss out on a lot of the important work and clearly London is at the top of the list at this point of a new startup hubs around the world we have been very fortunate to fund many companies from London it's nice to see some familiar faces in the room and I expected that trend will keep going and it will spend more time here and we'll have more companies from London come over and spend a few months with us but you know we're here to try to meet the next generation of great founders and hopefully a few of them will decide our program is worth considering and you know maybe is we sort of begin to understand sort of house YC works can you just sort of give us a flavor of some of the sort of metrics of your pipeline sort of hammering how many people operate or YC in each batch how many of those sort of order of magnitude come from Europe versus Asia and I suspect it's the widest pipeline or funnel of any investor on the planet yeah so we run two different programs are what we call YC core which is in person with us in Silicon Valley and then our fellowship which is remote and I think the total for those two together in terms of companies per year is 25 to 30,000 and of that maybe 15 to 20,000 coming into the two core sessions per year we we don't have perfect data I mean we could collect if we don't have it on where they come from from world but I would guess that more from Europe and Asia which would make Europe the biggest market outside of the US and then a pretty long tailor on the rest of the world and from a founders perspective you know there are lots of choices as to what kind of accelerator they should apply to or how they should kick off things what's the most important element of the the sort of pitch that you make to them as to why they should choose you over some of the other well swell avenues I think when you're considering any investor not not just an accelerator there's the good which is how will this investor help me and there's avoiding the bad which is how will this investor not hurt me and we try to be the best at our stage at those we don't have too much competition on from other accelerators but we have a lot of competition from later stage investors convincing founders they don't need any accelerator at all so our pitch is usually not why you should do YC instead of accelerator X but it's why you should do I see even if you can go off and raise a Series A today and that I think well I hope we have a good answer to which is that we try to a we try to never harm companies I think this one were really good at we tried to always do the best interests what's in the best interest of the founders we try to really never hold up anything the founders want and the way our model works is that when when the companies work out we invest at such an early stage we make so much money and we do so well that we can afford to write-off most for other investments so we never fight with founders over trying to get our money back or anything like that we never stop it founders if they want to you know sell early and I think this is actually really important to learn and internalized to be a good investor which is don't don't fight in the mediocre outcomes that the the long-term brand damage you do and the damage you do to your network and reputation is just not worth it so we're really good about not caring about what happens in anything except the exceptionally good scenarios you know when we're fortunate enough to get into business with an Airbnb or stripe or reddit or Dropbox this pays for a lot of mistakes and so we try to be really friendly on those and then in terms of helping the company is we try to build the fast network of startups in the world and I think at this point we're well on our way to doing that if you're YC company there are more than a thousand other YC companies that will do anything they can to help you we really have built a community Norman and and cultural value of when you're in YC you will get any help you possibly need from alumni companies and then when you yourself become an alumni you have to pay that forward and look I think we give pretty good advice I think we have good events but the community that we've built has been by far the most powerful thing that we've done and that is what founders want to join and and that is what we I think that is what explains our success this is fundamentally a network and so we have a network effect in our business and that has been difficult for other investors to replicate I'm sure people will now the people have seen that the model works I'm sure other people will do it but it's sort of like joining a guild of some sort and I think you get a significant boost forward as a company in the network and from a sort of industry standpoint the numbers that often have been sort of put about other if your funding 250 plus companies a year in across two cohorts that perhaps you know one in a hundred or so will turn out to be one of these winners that sort of pays for all the mistakes is is that what you're seeing kind of coming through in the data still as you scale up as they well I think that's the number for a really big one and I think it's a little bit better I think if you look at companies that are sort of 3 years old or older which is I think the fastest you can reasonably expect to get to a billion dollar evaluation it's about 1 in 70 or 180 of the companies that we fund have gone on to do that which I think I mean when press writes about this they often say wow you know like what a horrible track record you know even the best the best accelerator in the world only one out of 80 it goes on to be a multi-billion dollar company and you know I wish the people that write that would come in and look at the stage that these companies generally fund them because I think it's absolutely incredible that we're able to do that well and I think it speaks to the enormous untapped potential of talented but unknown unexperienced usually young unconnected people in the world and if you're willing to put in the effort to sift through that it is a huge amount of effort that there is just an enormous amount of value that is not yet been unlocked of new innovation to unleash on the world so however that number is only for the companies that go on to go with a billion or more far more than that gone to be worth to say 100 million or more and so I think a probably end up probably making some amount of money on somewhere between a third and a half of the companies we fund that's impressive but even even the one in 80 say that's still three companies a year the from inception pretty much you're yeah you have good ownership in the cap table I mean there isn't a venture firm that is as prolific or if you know any other venture firm that has three new billion dollar outcomes a year you know they're typically buying in later stages and their cost basis well there's also no venture fund that takes as many zeros as we do so that's the trade-off but it's one more happy to make and how do you sort of remain on this on that on the side of the founder as that the company scale up and become more self-sufficient in certain respects that we are just in service of the founders whatever the like Brian Chesky I don't try to bother him too often I don't like I don't try to like call him with unsolicited advice too often anymore I used to do that but at this point I figure out he knows what he's doing but if he calls me and is like hey I need this favor I will drop whatever I'm doing and go do it in fact that was what happened right before we started this talk and that's how we try to act with our companies we never try to control them we don't take board seats we don't have any voting rights we'd buy common stock and we don't and as the company gets does better and better we try to exert even less influence and even less control you make all your money on the occasional you know 10 100 billion dollar company and those are almost always run by a strong little founder and so I think the best thing you can do is get out of the way and does the role that you play change at all with the launch of the new continuity fund which some people may or may not know everything about so maybe we're spending 30 seconds describing it and then so last year we raised a 700 million dollar later-stage fund to try our hand at supporting our companies as they grow and the genesis for this was there was a class of companies that we became super interested in a few years ago and we were able to find them and fund them and they were going able to go and have great success but they needed huge amounts of capital and most other investors wouldn't fund them because they weren't software companies so these are what we call the hard tech companies you know one of the first ones that we found it that was just acquired by GM was called crews and there they make self-driving cars they were just acquired for over a billion dollars after two years that was pretty quick I wish they had not sold but there were a lot of other companies we funded in this same vein Helion makes fusion reactors Righetti quantum computing makes quantum computers obviously ginko Bioworks makes synthetic organisms and there are lots lots more and these are companies that I think are phenomenal investment opportunities and important to me personally and they weren't able to raise subsequent funny meanwhile we had a lot of other traditional software companies where we still thought we were more bullish on them we understood them better than everybody else and so we looked at both of those two things together and thought you know what it would be really great for ecosystem if we could be a friendly late-stage investor and we could support companies no one else will and we could change the norms for what it means to be a founder from the late stage investor in the same way we did that ten years ago for early stage investing our founders in general have not liked their late stage investors and I think if we can shake up that ecosystem that will be a big positive for all the founders that we fund in that we don't fund and we have really been able to do that in the first six months so it's been a new experience it's run by a fairly separate team inside of Y Combinator but I think we'll be able to support a lot of a lot of really cool companies this is a question that you may have had to think about before but how do you deal with the signaling risk and those kinds of issues now that you're potentially an actor in any late stage financing of a sort of YC successful company so this was such a difficult issue that we almost didn't raise the fund we would rather not make money we would rather not support our companies that you know we're already doing well then hurt companies that were struggling and so we spent six months debating what a late-stage fund might look like that did not violate the relationship we wanted to have with our founders and we came up with two rules both of which hurt our returns a little bit but preserve the community and in the long term will I hope ensure that we generate great returns one is that below a 300 million dollar valuation we do our pro rata in every company across the board it's automatic doesn't matter how good or bad we think you are we just do it so there's no signal to look at no investor can say well YC likes this company or doesn't because we do it every time and and we just accept investing in the companies that we think are bad as a cost of doing business and maintaining our relationships and community the second is that we set the threshold where we can make independent decisions above the number where signal still really plays so we looked a lot at where our companies tend to raise money based off of really hard numbers sort of growth capital instead of just a pitch and we found that in those that the signal didn't matter as much because people were really doing something much more mathematical mmm we found that that was around 250 million dollar evaluation and sort of leave ourselves a buffer we said that 300 million dollars was the valuation above which we would make decisions to lead our Molly Brown's and at that stage we're not I don't think viewed as a big provider of signal because most investors just don't think they know what we're doing when it comes to growth investing and so if anything we're like a little bit of anti signal but you know I think time will prove otherwise but in any case it's it's beyond the stage where I think we cause problems for our founders and from the point of view of the tension that you intimated you might sometimes see with Ceres a investors like so as mosaic you know Mike and I when we pitched our firm firmly saw ourselves as the folks that would invest after someone had been through YC or being potentially funded by angels or seed funds and there's you know lots of folks in the room that we work with like that I I can't imagine a scenario I would say don't go to YC unless we felt that that that would you know we sort of block us from yeah from an investing and even then if we thought it's the right thing to do for the company I think we would encourage the entrepreneurs to do do you see yourselves as not just disrupting the later stages of the venture ecosystem would the continuity fund but also at the earlier stages with with Series A funds no we don't we don't plan to ever be a series a firm I think one of the things that has worked well for YC is we know what we're good at but we also know we're not good at and series they invest in is very different you know what we're good at is I mean this is sort of a derogatory term for it but what we're good at is sprain and praying you know lots and lots of invest what what we're not as good at and what takes a huge amount of work is where you you choose five to ten companies and work incredibly closely with those as a series a board member and that is critical if it were not for really good series a board members I think why C's returns would be far far lower so I think we'd be doing our companies a huge disservice and we'd be bad at it to try to be a series a investor it would also cause obviously huge signaling problems that's why we only do the late stage investing in addition to our core program when you into the later stages those investors tend not to be intimately involved anyway and I don't think there is hopeful so I'm happy to out-compete those guys but you know the men and women that get involved as truly hands-on partners with these companies after YC spent far more time with we do than we do with these companies and provide them just incredible services and and we don't ever I don't think we'd ever be good at that we have no desire to go try to take on that business if you sort of imagine a world three five years from now how many companies could YC be funding and you know I'll give you more credit than saying you're spraying and praying because if if out of a funnel of twenty thirty thousand you're distilling it down to two hundred fifty that's already 350 or 350 yesterday you're already picking you know one in a hundred but how big can this become um my rough guess is that we are then we should be fifty one hundred percent bigger than we are today I think that's kind of a behind the curve we are all the good companies in the world and then the startup ecosystem worldwide maybe grows at twenty to thirty percent a year so you know quite a bit bigger to 3x with maybe Boise what would be great and we've you know tried a first version of this with the fellowship we have an evolution of that we're going to try out later this year what we'd love to do is figure out a way to keep the core program at roughly the same size but have a giant funnel above it where we can you know in a much lighter touch way reach 10,000 companies here something like that and and would they benefit from the network in the same degree as all the other participants that absent the three months program we couldn't find some way for them to benefit from the network it wouldn't be worth it they wouldn't get enough value it will have to be different and we certainly haven't invented it yet I think people think that we do a lot more really advanced planning and we have a lot more answers then then we actually have but we know we don't know and we're not afraid to admit it and we have no idea how this is going to work but it's important to do and you know we'll figure it out as best we can along the way and I guess as you as you think about some of the areas that you'd like to sponsor and take these bets on you know what I'd like to do is now sort of move the conversation into discussing some of those and and bring in my Chaffin my partner who's been spending a lot of time in our firm on on AI really knows one of the areas that you're very excited about so thank you thanks Simon um so maybe if we could just start by just talk about the origins of your interest in in AI before you sort of dive into some of the gnarly graces well maybe even before that I'll say sort of how we think about new areas we're not really a trends based investor but startup to us does not mean a software company startup means a company that is designed to grow very quickly it may fail but that's at least the goal and and so what we think about is we want to fund any company that has some plausible shot at being a 10 plus billion dollar company and that is such a strict rule that we don't allow ourselves any other rules or we'd have nothing to fund and so we have to be willing to look at companies in any area and if we're not an expert in that area but we think it might be super valuable then either one of the partners has to go become an expert or we have to hire a new partner and I think this is not the only model but it's a model that's worked really well for us we don't we don't constrain ourselves to the thing that is working today or that worked last year because we dont believe thats necessary thing that's going to work next year and we don't let ourselves have the excuse of saying well we don't know about that so we're not going to invest we think it's important we figure out how to get reasonably good at it and through this process we have decided to to really pay attention to some new areas biotech energy and AI are our three that I have spent a lot of time focusing on Hardware is something that other partners in the firm have done a lot with EdTech it's been another area of expansion more and more companies selling to government but this is kind of how we think about the world our first choice is always to support something that by funding a start-up but if there is technology that we think is really important or if there is a societal issue that we think is really important and it does not fit in a start-up we will find some other way to support it we fund nonprofits we have something called YC research which is a non-profit research lab and if there is something that we think is important that cannot or should not be done inside of a for-profit company then we do it this other way and so you know on the should not side we get something like AI on the can outside we get something like our basic income research but AI in particular is something that I probably like many people in this room have been interested in since I was a little kid I think you know many people that learn to program a computer for the first time realized that you know someday this is going to be really smart and and maybe be smarter than a human and so I studied AI in college my advisor was answering I know runs a ayap idea uh and at that time it was sort of depressing because we all had fervent conviction that AI was gonna be a big deal and nothing was working but I you know stayed close to the field and in the last four years or three years it's just been incredibly exciting to watch and it has been absolutely transformative we started a group called open AI Elon Musk and me and the former CTO of stripe and the former a guy from Google brain and that group now has about 25 people it is a non-profit the goal is to build general super a AI for the benefit of humanity and try to do that in a way where it is not a single for-profit company with a single AI that controls the world it hopefully doesn't go off the rails but a widely distributed AI where each human has an agent that becomes part of them to some degree and we sort of tried to just just should beat this power and make all the humans better and it's it's super exciting to work on very very exciting I mean just they're sort of positive and negative aspects to it and you saw it on the poster so maybe we can explore explore that a little bit a little bit more first you know the way you describe it's very personalized sensible I guess people could envisage an assistant or so like that but what are the sort of if you sort of want to could flesh out a little bit how you see sort of everyone and I don't know on the planet having their own AI and how what that would what that would look like beyond the sort of how we know perhaps think about assistance today I think that will certainly be one area where everyone will have a superhuman personal assistant where you can speak to something in true natural language it will know what you want and what go if they got a way to do it but I think things are about about to get pretty crazy we're going to we are not that far from a world where computers get better than humans at most non creative tasks and the creative tasks you know painting writing novels I think even that will come someday you know last year we got to a place where I think we saw the first types of doctors become less good at computers with AI radiologists we'll see I think in a lot of other areas certainly self-driving cars are now I think to a point where there's not a question of if but when they become far better than human drivers and I think when it's probably only a few years away you know Foxconn now has robots that are so good that for better or for worse I think for better they just eliminated a bunch a huge number of low skill menial labor and so you can see a world where we have basically effectively infinite resources and wealth this was actually another mission statement considered for Y Combinator which was to create infinite wealth the and then and then the question is what are the new jobs for humans I believe we'll figure this out I think humans have limitless demand and they will figure out new types of social structure and new ways to get status and fulfilment happiness and new jobs to do but they'll probably look really different and if you were sitting a few hundred years ago on the other side of the Industrial Revolution it was probably very hard to imagine that a lot of human jobs are going to get eliminated and the thing that was going to replace them was going to be software engineering and I think today it is you know someday we're gonna have software engineering get eliminated it's a job because you'll just be able to say to a computer build me this exact thing and it will do it and I think it's as hard to imagine the jobs that will come next as it was then to imagine software engineering so I think this is an important question I don't pretend to have the answer we're doing a study also in YC research where we're going to try giving about a thousand people a basic income for five years and we'll say we're gonna fast-forward to this world let's imagine it where we don't need everyone to work and we have enough resources we can give everyone money and you can do what you want and how will people spend their time and how will they find happiness and fulfilment and and social status and everything else that people care about and I think it's gonna be really different I think it's important to start studying this now because even if the jobs don't really change for ten or twenty or thirty years human society does not adapt very quickly and the sooner we can start seeing what happens and how people adapt I think the better off we'll be and we can hopefully learn how to make a future where people are are excited and engage and happy so it'll be interesting to see what goes on there but I think my view of this is like let's not be afraid of AI eliminating jobs because the jobs that it will eliminate first will be the worst jobs but if it does that it will do it because it can do it much less expensively than humans and so the cost of the quality of a great life will come down and we'll be in a world where we can choose we'll have to choose but we can choose to just be much better than we are today about redistributing wealth and we don't need everyone to work and people can have a great life and we'll be able to afford it because the cost of the great life will have come down so much in a world when we need the basic income in the first place so let's not be afraid of eliminating these jobs that I think are not are not jobs that people are excited about and let's let them find better more productive more fulfilling ways to spending time but I think that requires some foresight and some planning and some willingness to have a conversation that is not popular that's a big big big topic big big vision as well and I guess one of the things that marks out YC from perhaps some other sources of capital and ideas and coaching very interesting just to sort of switch a little bit to the negative because I guess as you described it one of the motivations around open AI was to avoid near concentration of yeah of AI so they're just sort of tease out a few things there one is that it seems like at least you and one of your co-founders opening I have slightly different concerns or maybe L on mask has additional concerns around sort of you know a bad actor obtaining AI and using it for negative well purposes and then there's also this sort of concept of you know genetic programming and how an AI could sort of you know put by pursuing its own apparently anodyne or utilitarian goals sort of compete for resources and yeah run amok so could you sort of explain it you know some of the different considerations you know I think we're both very afraid of the negative future and very excited for the positive future and and the reason that we're spending our time money on this is that we believe you know in the next not too long of a time period we have the opportunity to push it towards the positive future and we really want to try to do that it definitely is scary to me to think about the a single AI world so one approach that some people have to AI safety is to say hey multiple AI agents will fight with each other and will you know have a lot of conflict and that's very dangerous and that the safe approach is to have a single AI that rules the world as a benevolent dictator and stops all other AR projects and you know makes makes this utopia for humans and there is an argument that you can articulate that that is a good path the thing I have never been able to be comfortable with on that approach is let's say we are successful in creating this single AI that is a billion times smarter than the next most intelligent agent in the universe the smartest human and we think that we built in some controls and we think we built it to like humans but we somehow put a bug in there or there was something that we didn't understand and it decides to go the other direction and then you have this massively powerful agent that is a billion times more intelligent than the next most powerful agent I don't see how we have any hope of controlling it or getting it to do what we want it with like if it goes off I think things get really unsafe on the also you know there will presumably some group of people in the world that kind of control the AI and if that group of people decides I think the quote is absolute power corrupts absolutely if they decide something the other seven whatever billion of us don't like that scene as bad so I'm definitely afraid of a world that has a single concentrated AI I like better a world a lot of a eyes and in the same way that there are occasional bad humans but we as the collective are able to overpower them because we're all of roughly the same skills I think if we have a lot of a eyes and most of them want what we want and one then then they will be able to stop an occasional bad AI so I think that is that's what we call opening I open AI we wants to be open technology made available to everyone there's another problem that we're starting to think about now which is if you have humans an AI and they're separate and they want the same thing which is to sort of be the dominant species on the planet you have a hair in conflict whenever you have two groups that want the same thing and only one of them can have it like being the number one of the dominant species are in control you you have some amount of conflict and and so you know the world where we have that conflict and either we're trying to enslave AI they are trying to enslave us those both seem bad so I think Elon thinks to some people in the team have different opinions that some version of emerge and this can range from the simplest you know chat interface where everyone has like an AI companion that works together with the human and the humans do what the humans are good at the oddest the eyes good at and they kind of become this merged sense of self or you know Iman's version of this is that we just need to full-on cybernetics and brain implants other people I think we should go the other way and upload ourselves into the computer but whatever it is some sort of emerged so it's not Austin versus the AI but us and the AI is sort of one combined entity it seems to me like the most likely happy path okay interesting and we're gonna talk about crazy stuff later no no yeah this isn't the crazy stuff so the I mean one of the things that that raises is sort of regulation and you know if you look at it already today it's hot it's hot enough to approve a new asthma drug or something relatively benign let alone you know how we combine people in AI so just to sort of peel that yeah price that apart a little bit if first of all you started talking publicly about regulation and AI some time ago in the last sort of couple of years has your feeling for how regulation could work yeah I think our p'n I still think I should be regulated in the future I think this is all still pretty far away but whether it's 10 or 20 or 100 years away you know in in in human history that is the blink of an eye I mean the history of biological life that is really bit linked of an eye and so you know a lot of the debate at dinner parties in Silicon Valley and events like this is you know is AI ten or a hundred years away and I don't care what I think is interesting I think it is remarkable that we're not debating is AI going to happen or not but is it going to take ten or a hundred years neither which is a long time frame like you know we are that close to the end of the line of of humans being the most intelligent thing in the universe and so for me there's this question about like a lot of people talk about the regulation question of a timing question you know well maybe we should regulate AI but it's too far away and I actually agree it probably is too far away but it's not that far away and no one knows how to regulate it so I think we should start thinking about what to do there so that when we get closer to this whether it takes five ten twenty five years someone at least has an idea because today no one has any idea and and one of the other aspects about regular or thinking through regulation whenever it's applicable is sort of who determines what the common good is and are there inadvertent consequences of a given definition of a common good even if we can agree one so if we can well type that a little bit I'm like yeah I mean this is why we like the model of extension of individual human wills I don't I don't like the model of a single dictator yeah deciding what the human good is that that has gone off the rails most times that's been tried in history but if we can instead extend individual humans and make them better the humans can still decide collectively what what the common good is okay when you think about I'm so that the sources of data to that you know you can gather to to power open AI and how that's different from you know this source of data available to today's you know would be AI champions yeah could you just talk about that a little bit I think the data advantage is significantly overstated the the Internet is a giant source of data you know anyone with a connection with the Internet can get as big of a data set as they please many YC companies are also willing to contribute their data to open AI but we don't have a problem there moreover I don't think about the amount of data that a human needs to to train it's not actually that much you mean we can basically learn like two bits per second and so I've been alive 31 years times I guess it's like 300 million seconds per year times two bits per second it's not there's there's it's it's not a crazy amount of data that it takes the train of human to be pretty smart so some of our AI researchers believe that when you do you guys know the the Paul air dish the book this analogy this idea that God has this book of the most beautiful shortest mathematical proof for every theorem and when you die you get to see it and occasionally you get a glimpse of the page because you've you find the most beautifulest shortest proof for a given theorem and so are some of our researchers believe that when we when we get the AI algorithms from the book for building a when we discover those first of all you'll be able to print them on a t-shirt and second of all they won't require that much data to train and so I think the the advantage is overstated because I don't think it's going to be as hard as we think it is and I think it's gonna require as much data as we think it does this and then give given the importance of the mission is there anyone could eat you could talk to us about regarding the governance of open air that maybe is underappreciated public in the public um domain we are just now trying to figure out what the governance model will be today it's just Elon and I on the board but we now want to figure out how to expand that you know probably just something like seven other people not from Silicon Valley not from the world of technology perhaps maybe some of them will be and we also want to figure out a plan for how as we get closer and closer this becomes something kind of democratically voted on by the world we don't know what that structure is going to look like yet we're beginning to talk about it and and then from technological safeguards we've just hired our first to safety researchers which I'm delighted I think we got two of the best people in the world that okay and then I think probably a minor point but um there's been a lot of attention paid the individuals who have you know the heart of starting the project or foundation but could you talk about the corporate sponsors and whether they have any sort of any input you know they don't more pretty careful about that so we've had a number of companies that want to donate money and we've really appreciated the support and we try to be clear with them that you know you can donate money but you can't have any access and they're they've all been they all understand they're all killed that okay and then just sort of stepping back we talk about something very very long-term and yeah again as you said imminence is not part of the sort of AI the open AIS is not not a consideration yeah but but again this this idea that we should only work on things they're gonna happen in the next two years it's crazy yes yeah I think a lot of people don't work stuff like this because it's not going to happen in two years and that's that's a huge mistake yeah so what I wanted to ask about is you've you're on you've talked quite a fair bit about long-term ism and your preference for long-term thinking and just it'd be great to understand partly how you think that changes you how you evaluate problems and opportunity but but also when you look at and you'd speak to companies at YC you know how can a start-up factor long-term thinking more into its planning well honestly I think a lot of the problem it comes from investors I think most investors although they talk a huge game about being very long-term oriented are simply not at all they need results to raise their second fund they funds life is maybe only ten years and you know they want to like go buy their vacation home and they don't want to wait that long and so I think it starts actually with the investors it is up to the investors to convince the founders to take a super long term view sometimes you don't have to you know you get as a corollary page and they take a thirty-year view anyway but I think one of the things that YC has done really well is encourage our founders to take very long-term views we invest our money we don't have LPS we're doing the continuity fun but on the early stage that we don't have lp's do we have to answer to we don't just show any short-term things and we're happy to we want to make a lot of money but we're happy to wait a long time to do it and we understand that these things take a long time to compound so I think the way that this changes the most is investors deciding that they're willing to sign up for things they're going to take a long time and and and pushing founders to take a long time I think Silicon Valley is pretty good at this better than most other places in the world but still not good enough and certainly if you look at our most successful companies they're on path to take a very long time and I think I think investors can can push this through I I didn't plan this but I'm happy I became an investor a relatively young age because I made my first investments when I was 24 25 and I realized that you know if one advantage I had was that I could go invest in things that would take 50 years and I would still benefit from that and I think that's been a mindset that has been it's been good for me and does that play into the filter that you take as YC and in terms of the 350 companies that you admit into the to the program but do you skew it more towards like folks that have whether it's AI or you know other more long-term ambitious honestly for us it's so much about the founder if we see an incredible founder you know a Tracy of plan grid a Brian of Airbnb a Patrick of stripe they can be doing anything that they want and no matter how bad of an idea we think it is we will delightfully for our money at them and you know on the hope that they're smarter than we are and they see something we're missing and this has worked out for us many times and so yeah sure we love it if a great founder is working on area we care about but if it's an area that we love and a bad founder we still won't fund it so it's far more important to us to look at the person and say you know can we can we see this founder of growing in to be one of these iconic CEOs of these super impactful companies and we'll talk a little about energy and synthetic life going forward just while we're on this subject how do you screen for that and and and they're seeking honestly digit did you know when Brian and Joe and Nate walked in you know these are the guys five minutes within in that particular case I did there are plenty of other companies that have gone on to be successful where I didn't think I was not blown away in the first meeting but in that particular case me and everyone else that met that I won't take a special credit for this you know like they had been they did we can tell the story later if we have more time but it was this crazy crazy situation so those guys were and that was an easy generally what is what is the kind of question that you are or the emotion or intuition that you feel that helps you filter that way you know you're looking for evidence that the founders will do extraordinary things in the future and the best way to look at that is evidence of doing extraordinary things so far either in the beginning of that company if it's already been running or in those founders lives before the company relative to whatever kind of luck they were born into or not born into so you know we're as impressed by a founder who is born in rural Pakistan with nothing and makes it to the US to start a company as we are with someone that was born in the US with a little bit more luck and you know is able to start through business by the time they're 18 but as much as we can adjust in four circumstances we look for evidence that founders have done really extraordinary things and I think that shows a level of creativity and determination which is very important to be a good founder the general traits none of these will surprise any of you determination communication intelligence vision you know this one is a little bit more difficult to define but ideas we haven't heard before you know some evidence of the ability to have new ideas that everybody else doesn't have that's really valuable too and so taking that into some of these other areas that are part of the research activity that you mentioned can you spend a few minutes talking about both energy and sure synthetic life and sure when we attended the demo day earlier this year there was already some companies that were embarking on those areas but I know it's actually taking a person yeah so again if we can do something as a for-profit company we would rather do that then do it in the NYC research and so on the energy side we have been able to fund the the two areas we've concentrated on generation our solar and nuclear solar those companies are less hard difficult technology and more new business models so one company is called bright that sort of put solar panels on homes in Mexico telling me sign of sense on the nuclear generation side we have companies like Helion in Seattle working on fusion and Oklo working on very small very inexpensive fission reactors in in Mountain View we also funded some companies on energy storage energy transmission as well on synthetic biology we have funded dozens at this point of companies doing work here and that has been a really amazing field to watch in the same way that a I was sort of quiet for decades and then had amazing breakthroughs in a period of a few years we've we've seen the same thing in synthetic bio in the last few years you see this explosion of companies that are now able to create new organisms like ginkgo Bioworks which was one of the first synthetic bio companies that we funded to editing existing organisms and improving them in different ways so that I think will be a very important vector forward I'm conscious that I'm sure lots of kind of questions from the floor and you know many people we recognize here that I'm sure have been catalyzed into thinking from some of the things that Sam has said so we have a couple of people with with sort of mics that can go around but is there anyone from the floor that has a question or two Andrew I think yes it's just here thank you very much I just wanted to ask for a bit more detail on the basic income pilot than how clean it is and in particular how much money are you giving to people to replicate the world that you think may may arrive in time so the first thing that we're doing with the basic income study is a pilot this is a much smaller scale it'll last close to a year and it is to test our methods how we're going to study how much money to give how to distribute it how to track results and so that is really kind of the design phase of the study that will be with a hundred people in Auckland and we'll try different numbers and our hope is that we only need to run one pilot but if we have significant learnings that we learned that we're really wrong we'll have to run redesigning on another pilot before we ready to start the full study but if it goes well a year from now we could be ready to start the full-scale study and you know the the numbers that most people throw around or something on the order of $18,000 per year and I think we would do 500 people that we gave it to and 500 people that were the control group and again lots of questions we're trying to figure out now about how to distribute the money how to track progress but the plan would be to roll that out probably still in Auckland but maybe in two different cities at the same time next year Kristian thanks for hosting and thanks for being in London so under AI in the regulation piece so something that can I concerns me in a way right who get who got to decide how we regulated if it's the nation state each nation states can have their own priorities affected China and the US and India will regulate differently if it's a UN that'll take a long a long time and then I kind of start running Shore and actually who that should do it so in your mind we think about regulation for AI and not going down the benevolent dictator route what entity actually creates a regulation and just to add to that should it be a commercial entity you know we honestly don't know where this is actually something we're doing research on is who should regulate it and how what I think would be really cool and in just a cool sort of statement is if you can do something democratic on the internet because the Internet is powerful at this point the Internet can make consensus decisions the Internet can force them to some degree and so to see you know the community basically volunteer to be self regulated and then have the Internet as a whole and I don't know I don't propose to know the specifics here but to get input from people around the world that are part of this shared thing that is now I think more powerful than any single nation state I think that would be a kind of a great moment in the history of technology and so we're doing some research because it's a really hard problem to see can come up with a solution to throw it to the world for consideration I sort of kind of related to that sort of thinking you you mentioned that one of the benefits you had of starting your investment career at the age of 24 25 was that you could take a 50 year view on things and that sort of let me sort of thinking about you know what were sort of setting in motion here having implications that go well beyond 50 years and if you thought about the people who built the great cathedrals across Europe when they embarked upon the project the probability of it and that finishing at a lifetime was was close to build you know you see in Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is 250 years into a 400 year project but the foundation behind it was was religion and I sort of questioned you know similar to this that you know when I look across to the US and see the prospect of who might be in the White House that the social fabric that is is sitting behind what we're gonna set in motion is quite disturbing I think this is a really you know crucial thing who is actually doing that that research and you know where do you get those skills from that can kind of project what what's in a world it is that you know that there were setting in in motion are they you know from the technology sphere or are they from other spheres I think it's important to have a wide variety of backgrounds I think you want an organization of any sort but certainly in one like this where you're putting the place you're putting it into place and organization that is going to hopefully outlive all of you you you know religion is one way to get it to survive for a long period of time but a deep-seated belief about something that's really important for the future is another I think to do that it's very important to have diversity of backgrounds and life experiences on the team but to have a deeply shared vision for the future and so you want people that are engineers and philosophers and political thinkers and a lot of other things as well and you want them to come together and bring all of these different viewpoints about the world and skill sets but to share this deeply held high conviction belief about this version of the future that's absolutely critical and if this group doesn't do it it's not gonna get done right and I think that's how you create these things that outlast any individual even Trump Elly we have someone a lady at the front here it's been amazing just talking about the scope of the opportunities that you see to be exploited and and maybe following them from the last question as well I wonder how you think about bad things to be combatted so we're talking about religious extremism but I mean nationalism environmental challenges and plastic in the oceans do you see them as part of the opportunities as well or do you think about them difference no absolutely I mean I think many of these things are both incredible risks and incredible opportunities and again where we can address them with a for-profit company we'd like to do that and where we need to do it some other way we'll do that as well but you know we're trying to build as are all of you that the future we want to live in and there are a lot of bad things to combat and a lot of great things to build sometimes they're the same so I think the energy stuff that we talked about earlier if you could pick one thing to help the poorest half of the world a lot and all the rest of us still a large amount I think cheap clean safe energy would be the number one thing you know energy obviously wrecks havoc on the environment and health but also it caused a huge economic cost and it's responsible for a ton of war and a lot of other things that you could fix if you could just fix the energy problem one of the things that I'm always struck by when I read about different problems in the world is how many of them reduced to energy and so I think if that's one problem or if you could get that to work you would solve a lot of problems that seem unrelated and and that would be really powerful I think you know some of the crazy stuff happening right now on the Internet can also be addressed with better services although I don't think they'll be enough I think we also just need government action and regulation and policy I think one of the worst things that has happened on the Internet has been the complete disregard for basic human decency that you see there are things that people are willing to say you know from one computer screen to another that they would never ever say face-to-face or most people wouldn't you know it seems like we have some deep-seated evolutionary pressure where there is a it is socially unacceptable to be that rude or that crazy face to face there's probably some like if you did that you got kicked out of the tribe and didn't get to survive very long so we seem to have that program in to us not to do and it's gone missing on the internet and it makes the internet honestly not a super fun place to be a lot of the time and there's a question that can we build new technology to bring that back so maybe this is pure speculation maybe in VR if instead of typing back and forth we we feel like we're standing in front of another human and we feel like we have the latency is low enough and the fidelity is high enough that it's not this uncanny valley but it feels like we're standing face to face with another human maybe we can like trick our brains and get that evolutionary pressure to be decent people back and maybe it will feel sort of like more connected and we won't say well we should blow up that group of people to the same degree so I do think there are technological solutions to a lot of us but I don't think it's the only it's the only answer so I guess a lot of us founders in the room probably grew up and even in our last startup sort of reading Paul's essays and sort of almost ingraining into our DNA that mindset around done is better than perfect and get the product out a lot of us now are probably running companies that kind of fit into some spaces you talk about where it's this new generation where it's a lot of harder problems to run done is better than perfect might not be a mantra you can really run away with because it's regulations then there's ethics there's consumer privacy so are you seeing the sort of change in mindset for entrepreneurs coming into the YC program certainly a little bit although it is important you know there's a there's a big mistake a big danger zone here where where you can get into this mindset and say well I am trying to cure cancer and thus the normal rules of a startup don't apply to me I've done it to be frugal I don't have to move quickly I don't have to you know build a product that works I don't have to you know take safety seriously there are a lot of these things where you can get really long and I think it is super important to remember that no matter what you're doing you still have to win in the market and absolutely if you're if the stakes are higher you have to be a whole lot more careful on a whole lot more thoughtful and move a whole lot more slowly but that doesn't mean not to move forward at all and I think most startups still make the mistake of giving them an excuse giving themselves an excuse to not have to execute relentlessly and it's very important not to fall in that trap that said obviously you'll have to adjust it down quite a bit if you're you know working with human health we just saw on that topic if I can just add a question that follows on could you just talk to us a little bit about the sort of thought behind the investment in in asana which I guess is part of part of that thinking about how best to operate yeah um I have been really interested in how to coordinate groups of people for a long time I think going back to the thing we're talking about about you know like groups of 20 humans and not being too rude I think we're very good at organizing small groups but we are not very good generally as humans at at organizing groups of lots and lots of people - a common goal and corporations have been one answer to that religions have been one answer to that but it's sort of an amazing thing that it's possible at all and as YC gets bigger and bigger and you know we funded thousands and thousands of companies some version in the future where we funded thousands and thousands or tens of thousands of companies and there's millions of employees at them and and we want to be able to coordinate that whole group to some degree thinking about the technological tools that'll make that possible has been really interesting to us and I think asana has a very interesting way of doing that that kind of happens to just fit my own personal mental model and workflow okay Andre and just building on that last point and you mentioned coordinating large groups of people and gave religions and corporations as the example and many of the problems that you've been talking about today relate to global problems as opposed to nation bound problems and how does technology and some of the startups you're looking at allow us to coordinate on a global level and what does that mean for some of the you know arguably archaic notions of democracy yeah localized capitalism localized fiscal rules as the as the sort of normal well I mean good and bad I think that's already happened I think people choose the communities they want to be part of on the internet and the internet does not like sort of accepting China the internet does not have nation state boundaries and so people choose the communities that they want to be part of you see this on reddit where reddit is you know nominally one community but it's made up of tens of thousands of very distinct communities that people no matter where they are in the world can join and leave and do whatever they want I think we'll see a lot more of this and I I think that that trend and one other which is the ability of local the ability for local efforts to have non local effects you know if China burns a gigantic amount of coal it affects the whole world at some point I think those two things together if I had to guess would lead to a weakening of the traditional nation-state boundaries and more towards some interconnected world but I'm not sure about that because there are other forces pushing very hard in the other direction and I could see an alternate world where it goes harden the other way and you know to give the us example you know right now we're mostly one country we have 50 states and I could I couldn't see a world where the 50 states become really powerful and the u.s. becomes less powerful and people kind of move and get increasingly polarized so I think it's it's a really important area to think about certainly the work we're doing at YC I think will lead us towards more you know we're all kind of one world and one species and that's what I'd like to see but I could see it go the other way so we do maybe one or two more questions so I think great John it's not that different he's only 30 now I am a blessing and a curse that I've had is that I cannot make myself focus on something I don't find interesting and and I am pretty good about not doing things I don't want to do and so I don't have one of these super rigid you know today I do like Mondays I do this Tuesday this one's eyes dude this is rough there's like a very rough thing about like you know kind of Mondays are going to open the eye Tuesday's we do them in YC badge and other things any other days but beyond this very rough thing I try to just work on whatever I think is important and interesting and I try to have like very unstructured time I try to not have a lot of meetings they always fill up last minute the day before but I try to like leave a lot of time open to go work on whatever I think is is sort of the most important and interesting and stuff a lot of that is advising startups that's probably the biggest single time block and the second biggest is probably just running YC at this point we're big enough that it just like there's a lot of just sort of operational work to do there one last question yeah yeah so in addition to open AI another group that wisely research is sponsoring is they call themselves hark which is I think the human augmentation Research Center and open AI is obviously the AI side of the equation hark is the ia intelligence amplification side where we just figure out a you software or drugs or whatever to make humans better humans and hopefully kind of meet in the middle at some point so with that from mosaic and Mike and myself thank you very much for thank you guys for having us and

Channel: Mosaic Ventures

Views: 17,321

Rating: 4.8144331 out of 5

Keywords: ycombinator, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Energy, Synthetic Life, Technology, Startups, Venture Capital

Id: cKpmHoJfO5g

Length: 67min 39sec (4059 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2016