MULTI-MILLIONAIRE Shares Crazy Startup SUCCESS STORIES! | Garry Tan & Noah Kagan

in this video i talked to the amazing gary 10 who's a partner at y combinator from 2010 to 2015. he's invested in a ton of billion dollar companies like instacart coinbase soylent let's hear some wild stories of gary working with these companies and more the soylent story is kind of hilarious um i mean rob reinhart and matt cobble they were working on a totally different startup they were working on networking hardware and then rob created an online subreddit and community for this very very fringe thing which was he was sick of eating ramen and pizza and he thought well what if i could just make meals from a can from from literally powder and he named it soylent and it grew it grew and grew and grew as a following and then i remember them coming in for office hours and saying like hey we want to turn this into our startup now and i was like okay but one thing you cannot do is you cannot call it soylent but they ignored me which is good i mean good founders like ignore bad advice like in the end you know naming it that actually got them probably tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free earned media i mean it was totally free like people were pissed right like anyone who's you know into organic food it's an interesting counter case study to me it's like you know that was a very good example of like i gave horrible advice and i'm glad they didn't take my advice because they knew something that i didn't understand at the time but now i understand it's like you know good or bad you know every business is a meme now and you know nine out of 10 people heard about soylent and they hated it but all that it really mattered was you could get your like one out of 10 people who heard about it and they were like oh i want that and then they became subscribers and true believers so that's probably like the most extreme story of finding product market fit literally by choosing like an incendiary name that would force people to talk about it yeah instacart was fun in that i mean that was more apoorva never gave up yeah he mailed all the yc partners and i was the only one to reply and yc was half over it was only a 10 week program so i said it's half over you should apply to the next one it'd be almost im it'd be almost impossible to get you in and then he said he like zeroed in on almost and then he sent me a six pack of beer using the surface that he had and it was up and running in in a mountain view you got into y combinator after it started so talk to us about how that happened i applied two months late y combination had already started the chances were very low of me getting in i knew i had to do something that no one else had actually done before so i ordered uh gary tan one of the partners some beer you know as soon as he got it he was like what the hell like what is instacart right i need to find out he gave me a call next day i had a meeting with four partners at the same time next thing i know i'm in uh yc the funny thing was it was actually a really sort of common startup idea at that moment like lyft had just been created it was called i think zim ride at the time and um you know uber had just like started launching uberx so this idea of a totally online workforce was a brand new idea the thing that really stood out to me was apoorva had actually built it you know everyone has the idea but if you build both the driver app and the you know retail app and it's all ready to go and he hired two people off of craigslist to do it and i was one of the first hundred people to try and download the app and i was like this person isn't a talker they're a doer yeah they literally have it so it's like it doesn't matter you know yc is half over like this is a intelligence test and i hope we pass and i was like we're getting we're bringing him in tomorrow and then they got in and you know pretty clearly the best company in that yc batch maybe maybe the whole year and yc funds a lot of really good companies and knock on wood i mean 17 and a half billion dollar company um at this point and available to 80 of people in the united states now which is really crazy in a matter of eight years damn so don't yeah don't take no from an investor i guess and then you know on my end i love people who they go above and beyond right i i think that a poorville is actually probably thinking about exactly that he probably had a sense that there were other people trying to do this idea and that's actually an interesting mental framework it's like go out like find the urls and find the people who are literally doing all the things that you're trying to do and then make a mental catalog of all the things they're doing and then go above and beyond right so that it's clear like you know yes it's a crowded space but this is gonna be the one yeah i like that i really liked your message that he showed it he did it you know i'm sure you get emails like hey gary i'd like to help you do this thing versus you know on your youtube i want to help you versus like hey i did this for you already let me show you yeah that's yeah totally ah that's awesome and what was the uh coinbase yeah coinbase was pretty interesting because um this is a good example of someone who walked away from basically guaranteed money i mean airbnb in 2011. at that point it would had just hit a billion dollars valuation so everyone knew i think airbnb hitting a billion dollar valuation was that would actually put y combinator on the map in 2011. so one you're lucky to you're good before that it was you know only dropbox but i think the the consensus among silicon valley investors at the time was you know that's a really good one but you know any incubator could get one um once airbnb happened it was oh there's gonna be a whole bunch of them brian was working at that company ahead of anti-fraud but and it was interesting because at airbnb and it was interesting because he saw how hard it was for airbnb to do even basic things right when you're that early with the online marketplace it's like opening a bank account is was insane back then right let alone like fighting fraud and things like that and you know he basically got infected by you know satoshi nakamoto's white paper he read it he walked away from basically the guaranteed place to be to work on something that was so fringe that people were afraid to use their real names when they created services for it right like you know mount gox or um you know this was the land of like pseudonym right you know magic the gathering online exchange so and i remember buying bitcoin on on that and it was you know i had to wire money to you know some country that you know i'd never wired money to and it felt really scammy and by magic you know the money for my first bitcoin showed up in this like trading card website in japan and i bought my first bitcoin and uh it was terrible and scary um but i wanted to see what it was about and then here was brian again he made the website uh you could put a credit card in and you could buy a bitcoin like just just entering things off the website you didn't have to go to western union and wire anything it wasn't weird he put his name on the home page um you know he made it look like a bank and that was exactly what crypto actually needed at that moment it was interesting to see that because you know that's a great example of something that's incredibly fringe that frankly people thought was a joke i mean it became you know what we hope is actually software eating money and sort of took like great builder a great engineer to like take a step back and actually devote their lives to it like take a lot of risk you know like that was a guaranteed payday as close as it could be in silicon valley and he said that's not important what's more important is like helping usher in this new type of finance that could exist this is inevitable what have you invested in recently that you can share that you you're like i can see that this is a big wave or this person's moving into a big wave oh yeah i think my favorite one right now is a shelf engine so we preceded it friends of my friends from microsoft way back in the day so one of them started a sandwich brand that got to like five million dollars a year in revenue and then like sandwiches sam literally sandwiches yeah like you know sold in like you know dozens of delis in in seattle at the time and then one of our other friends he was a microsoft engineer and then uh the ceo you know stefan calb he uh got his friend b jordan to write a ordering software that was optimized and it it basically made the five million dollar a year sandwich brand an extra million dollars by preventing food waste and then i funded it and then now they're doing it at like a 100x scale for the world's biggest groceries um so you know kroger or walmart like they're actually groceries in la are apparently a few percentage points cheaper because of shelf engine right now and they're you know they went from zero to i think four or 500 stores this year and they're about to roll out to a few thousand so and you know 30 of perishable food goes in the garbage like no one eats it it's just waste you know and that's carbon footprint and it's a problem that like easily is solved with software so that's a good example of like i know you ask what are the fastest like you know this this company took like four years to get here right and you know we always talk about honestly most most startups are like sort of the 10-year overnight success and you you gotta grind for ten years five ten years like you know things not working you feel like you're gonna die it's you know the company's gonna die you have to lay everyone off like this is sort of the you know to quote elon musk like the eating glass and staring into the abyss part of being a founder and so while everyone can sort of you know look at the pedestal and they're like look like they did it i want that right what they miss is like there's like so much stuff of like it doesn't work and we're gonna die and i'm gonna lose all my money and i'm gonna lose all my investor money and my parents put money into this or whatever it is you know it's like my you know my friends put money into this or i'm gonna lose everything right there's sort of like that moment for like 10 years and then at some point like a few things break and then it's like oh it's working product market fit right and we all you know when we look at youtube or we watch we read like the press it's like you see it only at the pedestal stage and you think like oh that i just want that let's skip to that but no no there's like so much stuff that happened before that to even get there you mentioned as well long duration wins so finding a large market that's growing or sizeable and then sticking with it for a very long period of time like you said i like how long you're gonna do youtube for you're like i'm gonna do it forever yeah i wanna do it for the rest of my life i mean as long as it's fun and hard and valuable and you know i think it's as long as it's interesting then it's worth doing i was thinking about i biked to this weekend and it was the longest ride i've ever done and it really dawned on me i was i was like the only reason it's satisfying is because it's challenging yeah that's true yeah i mean that's that's what we're here for right if it was too easy then it's like uh it's like playing video games with cheat codes like you know on the one hand yeah it's sooner or later it's not fun anymore if i ever whenever i want to stop playing a game i just start like looking up the cheat codes and then it like snaps me right out of like whatever i was addicted to yeah it has got to be hard you want it to be hard so good stuff yeah hard and i would say fulfilling or hard and rewarding yeah rewarding is important too no thank you for having me man dude awesome you're the man we'll do this again that is a wrap i hope you love the interview with gary if you want more startup advice make sure to subscribe right up here and gary has an amazing video on his channel about billion dollar business ideas right up here i'll see you out there and i love you pew pew sniper style

Channel: Noah Kagan

Views: 26,226

Keywords: business ideas, entrepreneur motivation, motivational video

Id: vbRkBRD4dV8

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021