Y Combinator CEO Shares How They Pick Winners, Advice For Founders + Lessons From Paul Graham | Garry Tan Interview
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I don't think people are prepared or even aware of what's about to happen right now. And it's like super, super good news for anyone who's running a business. I think is involved with IT now .

is the learn to cook loser you I don't even know like .

what IT was .

a reply to, but IT seems to be going viral. So it's a good mean. I think somebody .

program was talking about, he was like giving this kid advice and he's like, you know, when you have a girlfriend or something like that, like they love to come home to the smell of like a meal being cut and then someone immediately random twitter roll is like what you're raising like a feminine man like, you know, he should be mascula isn't you learn to cook and then I think polls reply was learned to cook, come a loser.

Then all the builders like another things like tech people are like, you know, this is actually good general advice, like learn to cook as a high agency way of living. I think it's like the compressed idea of, you know build things actually, make things actually, go do things in the world that are of value. Maybe i'm ready too much into.

It's the more sixteen version of makes something people want.

The punched up version is is program .

like the definition of success, basically built like one of the greatest companies of all time, I see. And then IT started working well and then just bail to europe where he's living. I don't actually know this is true, but appears he's living in the words writing and being with his family and am like, is this guy? Did he just did he just pull the ultimate move? And IT worked out perfectly.

I think so I think you really did.

What's what's your version of that?

I mean, more less like I see as as a concept is like kind of a miracle. It's yeah there are very, very few um places in the world where anything like Y C ever happens. And then I just feel like I need to be like the water on the walls like, okay, let's this thing is working and then it's working for relatively mysterious reasons that are almost too obvious.

I mean, it's but I once a mystery and is obvious when I see itself is like pretty earnest, like it's just makes something people want applying. This thing will try to go through and sincere ly find the things we think could be really, really big and then we just give you a bunch of money and throw you in a room with all the other people who are you sort of the top one percent of people trying to do that thing. And then somehow some magic happens where, you know, five to ten percent of those companies become worth a billion dollars or more, and you know, Y, C, take some equity, but not that much.

You know, like seven percent specifically for people who often wouldn't have access to that capital or that network, like by default, anywhere, anywhere else. I mean, so it's kind of cool. It's just, you know one plus one equals three in a really unusual way, certain resembles a college in some ways. You know only incentive people paying tuition like we pay them.

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to get started for free. Back to the subject. You know, when I think of good brands, a lot of people just think of like like funny or cool things. But when you think of like what black rock or gold man like, some of these names are kind like, yeah, are harvard. They're like, there are a little ominous and like a little scary.

But their institutions, do you ever purposely think how do we become an institution? Or is this is all because of you just said let's have high standards like was IT on purpose? Or did I just happen because you had good values? How does that happen?

I mean, I think a lot of IT comes back to your earlier talking about pilGreen. And the guy is just a very unusual original thinker and very just clear communicator. And then I think the thing I learned from him in particular, that clear communication, and you are just using basic logic being able to explain your sort of, you know a to B2C and the n you zoo m out and the re's a r ea lly big ide a in the re tha t you kno w in ess ence, what a really good pitches um you know I think that that's where I came from like paul was just very you both my Frankly paul and juice, a living stone, his wife and cofounder, the two of them basically created this thing that feels different, didn't feel like another investor felt very welcoming.

I mean, this sort of viral tweet I think pg has about Jessica is like, you know, Jessica once cut of founders fingernails before he went on stage of demo dates. Because it's it's like you know at once very exacting here. We have very high standards, but then it's at at once also very um sort of like almost family are like homy just um welcoming and you have sort of that mix of both very earnest and very form table like those two things combined created. I don't know something that seems to create magic isn't IT wild.

by the way. Like just think about this one of my companies I recently taken through like a ma process and I talk to bankers and bankers.

So we we will go first and interview bankers like why should I go with you? Why should I give you four percent of this transaction for six months at work here at the very end? And they're all about their differentiated process, how they do more, more more, how they have the smartest st people, the room and all the things they brag about, about what makes them successful on paper makes sense. But it's kind of mid wit me because if you look at what I see, it's like, yeah we we invest in people before they even have an idea. Lot of the time have no traction.

Often they have to change ideas.

We don't negotiate every deal with seven percent for every single company. Uh, same deal. That's IT the application. Yes, like a one page form, you fill out online the of the interview, yeah, we talk you for ten minutes and we just give you a thumbs up, thumbs down from there. The all of the things was really only minutes.

ten minutes, oh my.

They're picking winners at a higher rate than anybody else side. I think they are attracting winners at a higher right than anybody, so makes the easier to pick. But there picking winners at a higher ate and every other investor, even though their process is simpler er and less than what you would think you need in order to be the number one player in the space.

And they basically, I think I ve read this, that is pretty insane. You guys basically every time you run a batch, you basically print three billion dollars of market cap on average. I did some math and I really looked at the the batch values so you know, like something like five percent, all the companies become unicorn.

But and you just do that a couple times a year. You do that twice year, and I would do the four times a year. You're like, yeah, let just print three billion dollars of market cap, two, four, two, four, twenty years. Yes, that is mind blowing, but that is so insane.

yeah. I mean, I think the the craziest thing i'd ever heard was basically the airbnb round where I think something like under twenty thousand dollars became two billion dollars. And the look with I P O when I P O D so and you know why he didn't even take the parade pretty wild on the sly, like easily could have returned five to seven billion dollars with a good portfolio management, a strategy. But you know, that's the thing. I think, uh, simple things work actually .

why c was A A company? Because I think it's been around like eighteen years, you said know at last eight years, you know why got to be up there like the top ten silica ley companies, things that got created that created so much of value. Do you think about IT that way? Or is there do I .

try get people to understand like this isn't just you know working at a company. This is uh you know I think we did the math on um how much money per employee we see in theory should drive. And I think we are something like twenty five million dollars per year per employee in terms of like you know sort of market cap value created in the world. And that's just the Carry like that our take like you know in terms of value created for our limited partners in year sort of overall in inserted, I think it's like close to a hundred million per year per employee. So it's pretty .

wild who are the even is like .

the pension fund. The word thing about what I see is I think we're going na released the White paper is pretty soon, but I haven't talked about this publicly before. Um we looked at a two year period from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty of people who invested in at least three Y C companies per bad for those two years.

The top top desi predictably was very good, was like sixteen ex, uh, the top cortile was also very good. I was, I mean, lesa outrageous returns for a such a short period of time, inventive period. The wild thing though is medium was five x and then the bottom cortile three point three x.

So it's really crazy because in venture here, if you look at how vcs make money, it's all in the parallel. There's only in sort of the top twenty five percent make any money at all. And then the top cortile, generally for any given year of V, C, A is only three acts. So it's pretty wild what's happening. You've read.

I can guess, read something. You've read six thousand Y C applications. So you've seen more of this than anybody.

You're the admissions officer. You've in a lot of these, uh, interviews, you've been seen the companies grow. What are the extreme winners look like early on? And do they look any different .

than the average company? I mean, honestly, they're very similar like my two crazy st wins. One was brian armstrong at coin base and he was A A solo software engineer working at know and airbnb.

And you know he had never started a company before. He had a lot of the things we worked on with him very early. We're like sort of the basics that you know it's sort of hard to believe now.

Uh, on the other side of him having built coin base, it's kind of hardball. If know there was a time when brian armstrong didn't know how to you do a product launch or um you even raise a single time from investors. So I think it's basically been that same profile like highly technical people who are just like sort of smart and earnest and that's about IT like that sort of mainly who we like to fund.

Um and then it's I think unusually really, really important today in twenty twenty four, I mean, large language models are basically opened everything up. I mean almost anything that a knowledge worker can do. You know, anyone with one hundred thirty I Q or below, pretty sure that with workflow and events, you could right software now that could do what that, you know, basically almost any knowledge worker to do. And you could do IT perfectly with, like, no management headaches. I think like really profound moment for all entrepreneurs.

period, I think means ama both had learned the code on our to do this for like twelve years. But but python, the hard way course on you to me, did all that shit. I think we, me now we get to skip the learn to is just gold now you don't learn to part.

You don't need to actually write IT. I mean, IT helps to be able to write a little bit yourself. But yeah I mean, the wild thing from here is with like the new developments in iwan in cogan, I actually think it'll be more important that you're able to speak to virtual developers and might instruct them on exactly what you want and all the different use cases. And like we're write at that moment where it's going from, like you really have to code IT all yourself to, you can just sort of talk to this pretty smart entity that will you do IT mostly for you like it's .

not even about no code and chat T I explaining here's the problems business. Can you like do you just like be a therof with me and help me? I come up with interesting solutions.

And the answers were shockingly good, by the way, I was like, I was like, pretty good. I just like brain starting with me and just been like, a sparing partner. Is there, you know, like, I know that why to see a lot of IT comes down to making people what people want and things like this.

And to me, that's a bit a bit of an where you you you're more of an artist and a scientist. But is there a world where you could take their six thousand applications and a bunch of other data that you have in kind of spread sheet your way to like. The likelihood that we build a company that and I think there's magi C2Create the se lik e met al dec o uni corns, whatever.

But is there a way we could like user data and spread sheet your way to like? Well, here's the interesting opportunity. This is going to get to some type of traction and wealth creation with .

a high rate of certains. Yeah some of us like we think someone might do something like that and they might totally work actually. And then the trickiest thing is like how do you actually get really smart people to come and do that thing? And you know, I mean, capital as a service has been, and I think, like to maths, talked about that, and I thought I was very interesting.

What of this sounds? Vo, I mean, I think they experimented with this when he was still working on social capital, where instead of having a ten thousand interview and yeah, how works, the I C is we actually have fourteen equal group partners, including myself. So we actually you hand read these applications and you know you're not talking to an A I when you do the time and in interview, literally just talking with us.

And then once we funded or just working with people day to day, you know, for those ten, twelve weeks and then onwards into the future of the company. I know seven percent of the company like a big seed investors. So we need to sort of be around and it's very like high touch and you get like an individual person. And then I think like the capital of service idea, like is really just, you know, connect your metrics, connect your stripe account, your bank account, your quick books. You know I mean, it's actually pretty doable today, like it's conceive l walls that someone should connect all those things up and then an you rank whether something's real or not, do the diligence and then if you like hit a certain bar, like boom, like huge money in your bank account and did .

you will see that when they do that for great stage company ties. I think they call to the eight ball is like you you connect all your data and then just tell you like they could just take your raw data and they could put IT into a format where they need to analyze IT. But then second dly, the benchmark use like, oh wow, they have best in clash attention for this category or they are below average, so don't invest right?

I thought the results like interesting but not like, yeah, really like, this is interesting. But remember when tragic ity started getting popular, I think about two years ago, and there is a guy on witter who had a really funny like name. I was like Green point or something like that.

And he told ChatGPT like, make me a content website. I can rank high on search and and commodities on ads. And I think within like three months he got IT to like twenty thousand dollars in monthly revenue to .

remember that story. Oh yeah.

Like the Normal way now is I prompt A I and I want A I to be an agent when he did was the opposite. He's like you tell me what to do, i'll be your human agent. You have a good idea and you prompt me like the new .

reason model year and I asked you a question you um today .

you probably think about like you know the future and billion dollar ideas. But when you were fourteen I read that you kind of hajeri hustle there you are called calling companies in the yellow pages trying to get work and you you made enough money to can actually help your family out, like move an apartment to a house. Could you tell that? So I ve never heard that before.

of course. Um I mean, let's see. I mean my parents, we grow because sometimes food insecure. My dad was a format in the machines shop and my mom was a home health aid and surfed nursing a system at convolution and homes for two jobs.

And me, my brother lived in, you know, apartments and free me in the bay area, sort of in the shadow silicon valley. And I guess one of the weird things is like my dad's actually an engineer, but he just didn't have the EQ to really hold on the jobs, and he also struggled with alcohol. M, so we just he was always losing his job.

And so we're always just like never had money around. And the thing was like he really did invest in computers like we had our first computer was a, you know, I, B, M, P, C, X, T. So, you know, we serve reality, poor, but you know, rich. And access to computers, which was like, really, really powerful for me. And I just realized, oh yeah, like i'm fourteen but I need to know how to make web pages and I started winning some awards for like web design as a kid in junior high. I started an underground newspaper with my um junior high friends and we learned how to make a website for that underground newspaper and we got and we call the online zine and the funniest thing was like we had you know, thousands of people would find IT off of use net news groups and things and we're write articles that you know uh I don't think people knew that we are fourteen like when a when you on the internet one thing we learned is like nobody knows that you are a dog I guess I don't know like people would just write letters to the editor like we were like a legitimate publication and I just got out of really addicted .

to that like an early vice 点 com yeah basically like .

I think we wrote you know my body wrote editorial about you know how the three strikes law was bad for california and you know we're like twelve years old like what do we know about any that stuff but um bear on the internet nobody can tell and you know I I think we wrote IT and pretty clear english like people couldn't tell that we were that Young and then I I feel like I got really addicted the internet and then I thought。 Well, maybe I can make money.

And you know, back then there is a thing called the yellow pages that they throw on your door step, and that's how you'd find businesses. And I thought, okay, the yellow pages is probably my link to making money somehow. Like if they have a business and they have a little ad in the yellow pages, literally in the print section, like and and this was not so early that like the internet had eaten yellow pages yet, but IT was a late enough that there was an internet section.

So I just started cold collings you seeing, hey, like, I know how to make web pages. Will anyone hear me? And sure enough, I ended up getting a job in riding my bike to the local web design firm that made city websites for like city of pleasant ten and fremont and sanoh.

And, you know, basically they paid me, you know, ten box of seven box and ten box an hour work on. I mean, i'd learned, how did you graphic design? I learned hl.

what is that? What's that phone script? Oh god.

first you have to deep in your voice, right?

A award winning web designer. And you know about fourteen, they say that, yeah, I think so. I've been a it's funny. I mean, I remember my first boss. He was, this is sort of his like side hustle.

So designer .

in in. Yeah.

I miss.

It's funny. I mean, I remember I was like this company called info land was, you know they had a one like basically I think I had a conference room and you know sort of an engineer then and the law and like a little reception desk, and that was the whole office. And I think there was one really technical, like sort of neck beard unix guy.

And then the funny thing was the C E O was also a bank, a regional bank manager, I think, get three month bank. And so, you know, the tech guy had walked into the local free month bank and know the internet was happening. And this bank manager was like, i'm going to give, i'm going to invest myself.

Like, i'm going to invest my own money and he became like the cofounder on this web design firm in uh nineteen and ninety three ninety four. So it's pretty wild to to think about. I mean, that's just how you started business and that was what business was like.

You didn't go on the internet and apply on a form or something. You literally walked into a bank and banks were exposed to low new money to start companies, which yeah I think to some extent still happens. But you know it's just funny to think like how that's evolved sense and at .

some point did you just make enough for you were like, mom that here like I can help .

what happened yeah I mean we I always lived in apartments growing up and I had A A little brother who was eight years Younger and you know I wanted us to live in. I wanted the american dream and so um you know I would still remember like helping cook the turkey at thanksgiving and you know the new house that you know our family bought and you know I help my parents with the downpayment. My parents still live in that home in freeman so i'm i'm helping them remodel IT right .

now that's missing. Hey, let's take a quick break to talk about another podcast that you should check out if is called the next wave, a toasted by that wolf and at the land is part of the hub spot pod gas network, which, of course, is your audio destination for business professionals like you.

You can catch the next wave with my wolf, and he's talking about where the plug is going with AI creators, AI technology, how you can apply IT to your growing business. So check in out, listen to the next wave wherever you get the pot. By the way, I looked up your old blog, I think I back in two thousand and one.

You even rote the following, which I think pretty accurate. He said, you know, blood are all over the place. This is back in two thousand and one.

So over twenty years ago, pretty soon we're all just be writing a blog. We won't really talk to friends have to catch up anymore. Human interaction will just boil down to clicking on someone's name on your favorite website.

And that'll be IT no more. Td is how do you do over a nice much of rapino at some pretentious cafe? Just read my log, if you to know.

My god, I that's .

instagram stories. But as the news feed, exactly, I think you mailed IT for Better and for worse.

Not funny. man. I wish the one thing I wish I could do is like go back in time and tell myself don't sell uh, your time. Like don't work for a consulting firm or like you know get paid ten dollars an hour. Like go make products.

But did you did you ever do that? I thought you were pretty Young when you first started getting involved. Y.

oh, I was twenty seven, so I was much later, honestly.

I mean, very Young. And the photos .

you actually didn't need to come from the, because I think i've heard a story that you will work in somewhere microsoft someone like that you Peter teel was, Peter teel was like, hey, quit your job in fact, i'll pay your whole salary to quit your job and come to found this new company, the little company we ve got called palencia.

Yeah, playing a ninety five billion dollar market cap company today and .

you turned them down.

You, I mean, you embrace .

yourself here.

of course. I mean, I want to stanford computer engineering. I mean, change my life.

Obviously a returning brothers of mine, joe lans or joe, joe landon and Stephen Colin steff and I went to uh high school together, grow up together, try to start a bunch companies together um here I was a year out of school. Here is two thousand four and I thought like, oh, look at me. I have health insurance.

I have a real job and then my old for turney brothers, who are a couple years h behind me at stanford, like, I guess they couldn't get a real jobs, that they gonna a good company. I don't know. It's a really funny to think about in retrospect, but you know, one of the things that was always really smart about the Peter heal old is when you start something, you always just need the smartest people around you.

And I was lucky enough that I made, you know, john Stephen list when that happened. And yeah, Peter was just running the playbook that worked for him when he sold paypal, which is, and this is something that people apparently red do you all the time now. And like when you start a thing, you take A A A half eleven sheet paper and you write down all the smartest st people, you know, and then you go take them out to dinner and lunch and just, you know, sit on their doorstep until they quit their jobs, come join you and you know, I guess that was pretty well.

I mean, Peter was not a billionaire yet. I think like the funniest thing about paypal and the papal movie is like they basically fought a land war in asia against ebay. You know I mean, when you don't have when you have to work on other people's distribution and other people's platforms, you just end up becoming like the most vicious hard core, you know the fighter types to just like got IT out to build a business on someone else's platform. And then the exit for paypal was just not big enough that IT made people, IT made people like able to take lots of risk, but not so much that they had lost all energy and will to fight well.

And there a, and there is a bunch of them too, so that I give you up a bunch. How much was Peter till worth? Do you think at that conversation? Because like, let's say you made eighty thousand dollars, that's like a big deal, right to be out to do. I'll give you eighty grand right now just .

to quit you to to get a folder founding engineer like I some of us like I could see myself doing that today. I mean, I think Peter was party worth like at least a couple hundred or at least one hundred million at that moment .

more than enough to build to say something like that. They end just like that yeah I mean.

I think it's a fair trade today. Like I would definitely trade like my you know my gold rolex for a first to founding engineer of a company that I think could be worth a hundred billion dollars in the future. That is a fair trade.

Did he make a compelling pitch like about the company? Or was he just I got him. This is just like a bit like IT. Was he did he see the future in that that sense of like what IT became?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the thing I really learned from that moment, I mean, I was twenty two. I didn't know how the world worked at all.

I mean, we had dinner at his french restaurant, freezing. Uh, I think that's one of the things you do. And you you know make IT the center millionaire. You do something stupid like open a restaurant and I mean, the restaurant was terrible, like the seat was really bad. And I mean.

he looks like millions of dollars on that restaurant.

I think so I mean, today is this really nice stake house? But yeah, I was bad. Um and then you know what I should have done? I mean, I was so lacking in social Graces, you know they did the whole pitch and then I think I said, no, like before the soup came out even and so he was like, there for the rest of the dinner he had actually reached. He was like, here, like, here's a check, like seventy thousand dollars, you know, how much year do you make a microsoft seventy thousand dollars test this check?

I didn't really understand IT in the moment and then I think in retrospect, like sort of the number one thing that I didn't understand that I do now sort of realized like I have to tell tell everyone this is how that works as um you know I didn't join at the time because I thought that um the world was sort of told to you or like me know sort of narrow to you I guess know I thought, oh, the wall street journal isn't writing about enterprise software. This isn't a hot space and so know that that was like fundamentally the backward way of thinking like the world doesn't like happen to you if you are actually a like prime mover in the world like Peter till or my friends um you go out and you go into the world and you discover something about the world like you actually talk to people like you actually talk to your users and you I sort together of primary first source information on how the world works. And what they had done was realized that the world's biggest companies and the world's biggest governments had no access to software engineers.

Or, you know, big back then people said, like big data or data mining was like, you know, today we say A I. But either way, these are just buz words for concepts that are like, actually pretty real. Like, I think that you know went into the security apparatus of like the three letter agencies in dc, and realized, like all the people they talk to, you know, they were working, even C I A N S A. Like the, you know, people who we expect to have the world's best technology, they really don't.

And Peter knew that because he somehow C, I and I say, whatever, when paypal was running there. Like, uh, you guys won. Have a conversation. Or like, you know, how do how do I like silk? L, I S, get A C, I, A tip.

Yeah I mean my country I don't know specifically I mean how they described IT to me I think was like they learned a lot about how the world works through the anti fraud part of paypal. And the core idea was that um they could find these fraud ings just using a graph database, just literally be no. People make a bunch of fake identities.

They send the money from one fake identity to another. And if you're just using c ul or a robed method, ges couldn't figure IT out. The second you like grafted out, you would find this ring and you know um what they found was that you know the of the three letter agencies didn't have access to that technology. So know what I needed to do was instead of taking my world view from the media or you know today from social media, or from, you know what, reporters were sort of distilling for me, what I needed to do is listen to people who had actually lived direct experience in doing something unusual and strong.

but still really .

hard. I really.

yes, I trying to make .

IT the level level city is like hardly also like level three ear something. And by the way palet teer.

i've got friends that are there and and i've learned a little bit about IT reading like I did not Peter. Still, I think it's easy for me to say Peter till back then seemed like an obvious winner but the palencia idea didn't like IT seemed IT seemed like he didn't work for like two years or something like that like IT was definitely IT seemed like I had this Normal start of trajectory. Words like this sounds working.

Maybe it's working. It's definite not working all right now actually has legs. The Y C trophy sara thing like IT seems like I have that was Normal Normal like issues except like maybe five years .

yeah took many, many years before I started driving revenue and you know became real um yeah the trick is that like Y C companies always come to me and asked, like, what could I learn from the planter experience and i'm like, are you is your name period heel and are you willing to put, you know, tens of millions of dollars of your own money into IT before and sort of weight and be incredibly patient and ignore all the signs that you you know weren't getting revenue and not you know actually working for so long to the point that you know suddenly had started absolutely working and working like ten times Better than you thought what like that's just not a thing that people are really capable of doing on.

Certainly they are first billion dollars of their first year talent here, sort of like the the most amazing version of like the second, third start up that people do like your first start up. You got to just got IT out. Sometimes it's like how do you like get to your first million dollars, right?

Well, that is the name of the podcast. So i'm curious what's your advice or take on that? Like how did you do IT? How did you think about IT? and. Knowing what you know now, how would you go make your first million?

Yeah I mean, what's funny is in the end, like talented ended up being huge, but I took IT didn't really IPO until many, many years later. Like I mean, I designed the logo in two thousands. I joined this employee number ten. We will do these ridiculous things like go to uh stanford and give out pizza and then we were like ten people, fifteen people working there.

But the pizz box would have our painter logo that I designed and like join the next google and people like eat the pizza and you'd like give us dirty looks like, how dare you what's the egg is wrong with you guys and then um let's see my first win. I mean, the palette shares did turn out to be something, but I did not seem like IT was going to for a really long time. I think my first actual million dollars was selling a few million dollars worth of twitter stock at IPO.

And so I was actually really late, like twenty. I mean, for me, I started working in tech like when I was fourteen, so like nineteen ninety six and ninety five. And then I mean, I think IT yeah literally took like eighteen years of like working as an engineer and not having money and having like fifty thousand dollars credit card deck come to color. And I think that might have even done one of the reasons why I didn't a quick to join talent here. I was like, I felt in two thousand four, I still had like thirty forty thousand dollars in credit or dad, and like maybe fifty thousand dollars in student loans.

And I just like I like, well, like seventy thousands a lot but you know, how am I going to a actually yeah I don't know if this job leaving existence six or nine months and like I could be a life for microsoft and of course, in retrospect, like being a life for microsoft would be sort of like a life of torture at some level. So ah my first million was actually twitter stock. Uh, so I started company in two thousand eight called postures is a blog platform.

I used to use IT. I love postures.

yeah. IT was a that simple blogs by email. Um you just email ed poster posters 点 com you didn't have to log in or like learn how you software and then we just reply back with like here's your blog e like here's your website and you know you can send IT to your friends and you is sort of I can email us to so you could do IT with your family。 A lot of people use IT like share photos with your family. Grew telex year on year, two years in a row until a instagram came out.

I remember when instagram came out, posters was actually one of little checkmark lost of the sense of time I think was like, you know posters tumblr um four square twitter and I like up the sharing page and I remember a Chris ca, one of our investors emailed us about IT and was like, hey, what do you think about instagram and before I could reply, my profile replied, IT sucks like and we've a one line, replied IT from socket sing. I'm very disappointed in you guys and then I just was like, you know sleep deprived didn't think about IT again. But like I think about that all the time now because you know when you're working on a start up, like you know we didn't actually even totally understand why we are growing that fast.

Um in retrospect, he was actually because the iphone was new and people are taking lots of photos and there were no apps that made IT easy to upload and the instagram was sort of the first free APP that created a network that also even had a little bit of utility with their filters and IT was all free. And um basically, you know we got run over by the eventual winner. And you know I think that's one of the big dangers for founders period is when we launched in two thousand eight year, Michael arrington, a tech runge, wrote about IT and he framed us off the bat.

He was like, posterities take in a way easier to use the tumbler. And so we sort of made a mistake and took like that competition and then made IT our identity and is something that advice I have to give to the founders all the time now, which is like we weren't competing against tumbler. We are competing against how people were getting photos off of their phone, actually.

But you know, when you're not careful, you sort of allow media or other people to sort of frame your reality, and then you just play the wrong game like tumbler and even want to be tumbler. That ended up having zero enterprise value. I think that's also one of the cool things about silicon valley, is like you can even sort of screw IT up if I really uh introspect on what I wish happened.

Um you know we had about a million users who like super dedicated the posters. We easily could have you know sort of charged five dollars or ten dollars a month for IT. We know we are a team of like twelve people.

We easily would have been profitable. And then I I remember because we were hanging out with our friends at webbed like a David recent o and dan veltri who were amazing. I mean, they they were they only ever raised uh in a tiny amount of money out of demo day and never raised a serious day.

And are they eventually self like three hundred .

million dollars yeah at the square like sort of I think pri po and then square, of course, like went on its crazy runs. So these guys are like me, you know, hundred times of more money than me. And my cofounder and poster is like, you know, rightly so, they did IT not through like continuing to raise venture dollars, but by um being profitable cash flowing by compounding, by focusing on their users and like playing their own game instead of playing the game that was why can be sort of chosen for you by either your investors or social media or by reporters and take tech press like, you know, just play your own game, like make up your own mind. So you know, if I did IT again, like we easily probably could have done that.

And then instead I think we ended up pivoting out of um you know that postures idea and we were just wanting to continue to chase this idea that we could be the free social network and I distinctly remember meeting uh Peter finton, a benchmark and he passed on our serious day because we didn't have a good answer for this. Now are you a platform or you a network? And we said both because you know that's what founders who like you don't have strong opinions and saying I think .

like it's a multiple choice taxi you to circle yeah you're wrong that way but .

I don't know this is all you know twenty twenty high insight. I mean, we use I use these stories all the time to try to help founders get on the right path to real enterprise value all the time now, right? So know not just make something people want and raise a series a and b and like look like a successful startups actually makes something people want and that's the end in itself. And if you do that, like you're gona make money and you know hopefully you can uh compound that and like you know create real enterprise value for yourself. And that's that's sort of the game.

So here's the deal. I made most of my money from a newsletter business. He was called the hostel, and there was a daily news letter at scale to millions of debts.

Ribes and IT was the greatest business on earth. The problem with IT was that I had cost of forty employees, and only three of them were actually doing any writing. The other employees were growing the news letter, building up the tech for the platform and selling ads.

And honestly, IT was a huge pain in the, but today's episode is brought to you by beehive. They are a platform that is built exactly for this. If you want to grow your news letter, if you want to tize a newsletter, they do all of the stuff that I had to hire dozens of employees to do.

So check out out b hive dot com. That's B E E H I I V dot com. We want to ask you about uh uh bunch a cautions about different stories because you probably a lot, a lot of stories.

But what's interesting about that story is you you like punchers of very I don't know if I felt at that way then, but now it's a very serious company or like they prevent terrorist attacks at times. So a very serious problem. Uh, what you are working on after that you could like someone could be like, well, that's just like a blogging platform that's just this like that's that's quote, less serious. Did you ever like I mean, I guess i'm stop or judging because I feel this way sometimes where i'm like i'm doing something that's not serious, but you can have done both and you've done now you're back to A A relatives. Serious thing is wise is a multi body the company um how do you baLance like like working on something that seems fun and cool versus like a serious big thing?

I mean, I think that goes back to everything a little bit earlier, which is just like be careful what frame you accept. It's all made up but uh you get to make IT up and then um you know for postures and blogging like they said the same thing about facebook and I remember spending time with boys and you know a bunch of the bear are friends who are early facebook irs. They never accept to the frame that facebook was not a serious and important thing.

You know, they their narrative was very clear, like they had a very strong cold and the coat was just clearly, once every few decades, I think very explicitly, I would say this like once every few decades, like everything would change, media would totally change and like they were right, like this social layer came up and um yeah, this is sort of the reason why I feel like if you're running a business today, you can have to be a creator. Because if you're not a creator, you got ta buy eyeballs somehow. And I guess who's got the monopoly and eyeballs? You know larr gay and mark acr berg, you got to go pay you got to pay the toll to, you know go across the bridge like you know the second Price auction mechanism in, uh, the add networks for like all incremental attention is so valuable that these are like the most durable, powerful network, affects businesses that I cannot .

be disrupted. So we are you telling all founders .

to go build die? If you're doing consumer, you you basically .

have to do the same thing if a to like. And they even more valuable because you need a smaller.

more targeted audience. Oh yeah.

that be great is harder to target. A pretty interesting thing you didn't. But if you are saying.

yeah, we have mark tinkers coming to speak at our many conference later today and you know we're going to talk about IT, it's like how do you actually get in criminal customers? And distribution really matters for consumer businesses, but that's also why you know we've had a earth in really break out consumer businesses for ten years. Um you I think that this will change.

I mean with A I A I does change things. I don't think it's broken the distribution advantage. You I think that the big tech companies have a total strangle hold on the incremental user and you have to pay them still. I mean, it's just purely market dynamic, right? Like, you know, we're selling widget x or game x or dating site acts or whatever is.

But you know are you body from college or you or someone from halfway around the world in eastern europe can like take what we've done and like, do the exact same thing, or go to our supplier in china and like, get the same drop shipping relationship. And so at that point, like the second Price auction means, like, well, I want that customer. No, I want that customer.

No, I want that customer. Guess what is an auction like every incremental dollar that is gross margin google, facebook will just extract because it's a perfect marketplace and not just the world we live in right now. And then and I think that the purse form of alpha that exist still is saying interesting, valuable things that um yeah and the youtube algorithm and the x algorithm and you know um to a less extent like instagram.

I mean, I think tiktok is actually pretty wild, like they're just giving a way distribution over there, especially for brand new creators. Um I think meat is probably really dropped the ball on how they are thinking about creators. They just like I don't know what's going on there seems like they only want to satisfy the people who are already big, which you know is not that helpful for people are trying to do new things.

Um but yeah that that sort of the regime we live in um you know for B2B wha t we see tha t why see s tha t you don 't pro bably sev en yea r eig hty per cent of com panies are B2B and ou r mo st w ell a ttend ed many c onfer ence. Every bad is actually the sales mini conference um you know uh because ani founder sales like that book, we give a copy that's like literally every founder a lot of us about a mindset shift like most people have never been rejected ninety five out of one hundred times like it's just so like soul crushing to get to know that many times in your life. But it's also you know for eighty ninety percent of businesses today.

you Better get good if your web psychos sites five percent you do at phenomena go out, not one hundred doors and ninety five notes.

like the you fail the enterprise contracts, paying you ten thousand to one hundred thousand dollars a year, like you're the biggest winner in the world. Like that's how the stuff works.

We gotta ask you about some of the people that you've been able to meet. I'll tell you what I want and I hope that you give IT to us.

I know you you want, but so being sam kind of her in the what i'll call like the way the most people live the life, which is you wake up every day, you got to your project, to your business matter, if you ten thousand dollars a month, hundred thousand or ten million dollars month doesn't really matter, you wake every day. And then we all look for kind of like this, entertainment, inspiration, thinking. And we get a lot of IT from twitter, from podcast.

And one of the best things is when you hear about the way that some of the people you admire Operate or the way that they they handle things are the way that they dealt with a situation or something about the personality. Of course, it's sort of you know, cricket ure, it's not a perfect picture and whenever they are not perfect people, but IT is bad. Asked to hear those stories and we hear about ilan, but you are on in a really amazing circle where, you know palgrave sam, man, like all of the y seve network or people you've been around, you have been around the before they were, you know, big. And I would love if you could tell us a couple of like either personality traits or stories that stand out for some of the people, some curious, a long way, way of sag. Can you tell me some call stories about .

some of these characters that you the funny st story I remember from working with, uh, poorer in the office. I mean, he gave me my first shot as an investor and as an adviser to start up. I was burned out from postures with microfilm and I had like a falling out and he wanted to become google groups.

I was like, dude, I don't even think that google wants to be running good groups like what we should just charge money but um yeah paul, like I think really did my polin Jessica, basically like did all the admissions work with all the companies is like twenty eleven. Even the whole Y C. Campus was not a campus. IT was like a warehouse with some carpet and some like customs, like very cheap. I mean, just the tables and benches the benches were so rapidly that like if you start on one side like and the other person on the other side like you know stood up like you'd fall over like there is like a bunch funny things about why they earlier was like this tiny thing um and to paint a picture like people still when I said I was gonna go work at why see ah as a designer in residence my friends in venture or startups would say oh that's nice IT sounded like I was going to volunteer at like a high school camp or he was like a high school basketball camp or something like oh that's oh that's nice that's so you know I hope you enjoy that .

like you good for you exactly.

And um you know dropbox had happened as know and I had become a billion dollar company, but L B N B I think was just about to become a billion dollar 点 company。 And you know I I I think this is lost of the sense of time but I remember sara, I had created a had a written a book called by one year lucky to your good so that twenty eleven, I think, was the one you're lucky to your good moment for.

Why see he where people realized, oh, this isn't like some fringe thing. It's actually starting to turn out like basically the most dominant startups that exists. It's like a very concentrated form of silicon valley.

And about that time, um yeah we had there was literally one person who did all the books, all the finances, all the audits, all the C F O stuff. And SHE needed a copy machines. SHE got one of those like uh sort of waste height copy machines that um you know look corporate and I had like these little stickers on IT.

And then I remember pillar m came in is like, what is this? Why is this here? And I was like, sort of this toda of a corporation is like, I remember seeing these at yahoo and I hated them like he started like scraping off the sticker that had like the phone number of the little company that uh would maintain the the copy machine and ah I guess IT just jumps out at me is like this the very interesting cork of paul that was like, absolutely right.

And you know, I sort of stay up at night thinking about like, how do I make sure that Y C. Never feels corporate? P G, H P G would show up in like shorts and birkenstocks, you know, all day.

I think he he wore cakey pants to my wedding. So my mother and my, my sister and law was like, excuse mr. This is a private wedding. And like, no, no, no, that's my boss. Um so I mean, there's this I think what I learned from paul was that.

I think there is an insidious nature to like formality and um corporate and just like having a where a suit or the convention, right like I think there's incredible value in being very, very unconventional. Whenever there is prestige and or convention, you should be wary of that thing because, you know, there's got to be some other weird, so fucking things that are associated with that, that you, no one by default, would sort of choose to have your address code on't. Like what you know, what are some other examples of this?

Like you basically you should beware of about your own formality and um try to fight against IT is just like try to be super matter of fact um and I think that that's one of the things that just makes companies bad. I I wonder like as people who run your own businesses, you ever think about that? Like you go into a meeting and think, like was that the meeting that if I were not me running this place, like what I want to be in that .

meeting is the same thing is the framing thing. You you behave like you think you're supposed to behave, this is what uh kind of make sense. Um do you start playing business a little bit? It's sort of like, you know, when you start a company, a lot of people play business by getting like a business car before they get the customer and then you want to step out of IT.

No, do you like to make the thing, you start making the day thing and you start get some customers and you can go back to playing business again. Yeah um which which is definitely part of the silicon die thing. You know like OKR measuring things quarterly, like there is a bunch of like lamest that I am myself for victim to and you have to like pull yourself out of that trap.

But some of IT is like useful. I guess if your airbnb you have you have six thousand employs you, you do slow down, but it's hard to know what's truth. There is what like what you should do versus what you have to do type of thing.

I will say that I think it's possible for people to do uh, insane business now with like two pizza teams like I think that you know probably in your community or maybe you guys yourselves will end up making these like hundred million of like billion dollar a year businesses that are totally empowered by large language models that like do not need more than twenty people working at them.

I think that this is literally the most exciting news that you know, we're pretty sure is going to happen the next few years, especially right now. And like that is the one thing that these giant companies that have like thousands of people like IT is completely like corporate amErica is completely unprepared for this moment, like they're gonna get run over by a thousand startups that are way more agile that you aren't completely drowning and convention. They can just do the right thing for the customer and the cost spaces will come down at time.

You know the the tRicky thing is like i'm not sure if this inflation or deffand tion, like what's gonna happen here, right, like Prices and theory should come down. Things should get a lot more, uh, competitive. I mean, on the flip side, like the hope is that all of our you know products and services get um a lot Better, cheap, er, faster, real fast.

I mean, this is the moment like literally we talk to people who are engine managers and like to and like even engineering teams. I think that it's almost generational. Like we get is like in the water for us right now because we spend all of our time with like twenty two, twenty five, twenty eight year old who are like the me from you know fifteen years ago, like we're just helping the next generation right now.

And they were like born on the internet. They were born with large language models, you know um and then there is sort of uh Frankly, i'm forty three, like my generation of sea levels like I don't like I don't think people are prepared or even aware of what's about to happen right now. And it's like super, super good news for anyone who's running a business who's super ago because you don't have to be doomed to calling in the business process automation call center, you don't have to like her the team in the Philippines anymore if anything, like that's one of the more direct advice we give to uh, people looking for started ideas in the batch right now.

If people are pivoting, we're like, okay, well, you're selling do let's say like accounting firms um you know but you're having trouble with enterprise sales. What if you targeted people who already spend, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on a call center in the Philippines or eastern europe or anywhere else? Like why don't you just reach out to people like that and just replace what they rely on? You know, they are with large language models that have great evils and great workflow like that is just, you know, I think we will have many companies driving tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, like literally in the next like two years. This is like hundreds of them, thousands of them are going to pop up right now just doing that.

So exciting.

What companies um are you super excited about that we should watch out for? We should go check out because you live in the future, you you're further in the future than we are.

Obviously like a the tooling for this is important, like there's gonna be a lot around um helping people build this stuff. Um you like events in particular, like doing a test driven is important. The danger for most founders right now is is very easy to make them aware that you can use to raise money and then you're attempt to this sort of you know quote and rodogune mps like you will just write code that has some prompts and you won't write any tests.

And then are the funny thing that we're seeing right now that I think is super true is again like going back to what you're saying earlier, like it's important to build your world view on how the world works directly from customers and their customer data. So the sort of Vincent repeat thing that's like maybe eighty percent of Y C. What Y C companies are doing right now that I think anyone could do is go and find real people who like are running businesses.

And they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on giant teams of people doing like rote repeating knowledge work and then get access to their data, get access to the flow of their work. Watch how they do IT and then literally right test cases using and if there's hu cino or ah the elms aren't actually able to by consistently do the thing you want, you actually have to chop down the prompts more like you're asking for the elm to do too much like the elements are capable of maybe like hundred twenty I Q level work right now. And if you are, you know giving IT like too much in the context window and asking IT to output too much is just like, uh, do IT in steps, right? This is literally what a one and uh you know, reasoning already does using chain of thoughts.

The interesting thing and weird thing that i'm tracking right now that i'm a little bit worried about is IT is entirely possible that the next generation of, uh, large language models from anthropic and OpenAI and meter are you know one and then two orders of magnitude uh in number, in like compute and number of parameters. And then we just get like here, the darro amede scaling laws paper specifically says, like these big large mind language model A I laws are going to spend a billion and then ten billion dollars on the next generations. And like if we get like continue step function improvement, like the tRicky est thing is like all the stuff that even what we're doing as bounders are doing, like, you know, maybe the models will just do for themselves.

And you know I think that my hope is that um you know there's not enough agency in these things and then you know maybe what will happen what what we hope and what we think will happen is that the people who establish brands, motes and evils right now when the next generation models happen, their cost structure just comes down by like tex. And then they already have like the revenue and the the market captured in some way that they're like sort of beating the software in convents that they're going up against. They themselves have like tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

And then like basically the standard motes apply, like look at porters five forces and you're like, you know a you have way, way Better access to data, your your systems or wait smarter IT cost a lot of money to take a risk and switch off of those systems and then you understand you have a sales force that is way Better and smarter. And so if you take out, you know that sort of the gambit right now, like if you do prompts and evils, you're pulling forward the future by a few years. You're trying to like grab as much land as you possibly can right now and and then from there like hope you can hold on and build the next microsoft, the next sales force or you know the next ten know ten, two hundred billion of our company.

Was that obviously saying woman left Y. C. To do this?

I wish I was smart enough to predict that this was what was going to happen.

Did you think that he was going to be the man like he is now, like, you know, paul m. Has essay was like, here's five people i'd bet on and one of them, the fifth one was like a twenty five year old, sam alt men. And the other three were like, you know, this and kid, so I did you were you like, whatever same does is going to be a generational company? Or were you like might be IT could be mildly successful?

I mean, I think I could a bit in full transparency like i'm gonna super honest. I was like, man, I I don't quite get IT. You know, I he a, when he was sitting in my my shoes as president of Y C, uh, he come back and I remember sitting in the group partner room and he'd say, like, well, this is what elan was talking about.

This is what Larry was talking about and you know they were all talking about A I and they were a sort of talking about the size scenarios um and i'm like, man, I saw terminator two two but that was a movie OK and I think that I am changing my tune at this point like, you know, I wish that I was smart enough to be erode actually totally a believer. Yeah i'm a believer now um do I believe that we're going na end up in like a doomed scenario? Like I still don't really believe that. There is that much agency .

in these things, which is the judge questionable tier I think god, that you've like already made up so many other successful investment that I know that gay is got a good .

judgment and like can pick the you eventually .

yeah was palely employee ten after after he said no to the code, even been up there, right?

So I mean, now you know, we are full beliefs in large language models. But no, I think the thing that a little bit lost to the sands of time is, you know what what sam was absolutely right about was um jumping on this thing that the smartest people in the world were already talking about, like eight nine years ago. And then he built IT, you know he invested the money.

He um you brought together the people IT was no small task to bring together the smartest A I researchers in the world. And then not only that, he was like semi miracle. You know, you could ask, why didn't mata do this before? Why didn't google do this before? Why didn't microsoft research do this before? Like all of those people had virtually limitless access to resources.

And to weave this back together, I think there is something really terrible and limiting about like giant organizations that are not capable of evolving and making smart decisions. I mean, that's what big tech is like. They're sort of like big daycares for the most technical, smart people in the world and it's like, here's here, do you know place in volleyball will cook you lunch like here, you know, here's do your laundry at work you know like, you know, let's totally infantilize the smartest people in the world and like that's a waste time.

Like what needed to happen was um the ability you know, one of the things that god explained to me why uh IT was open a eye that came up and like invested you know millions first and then tens of millions and hundreds of millions into the large language model and your transformers for language um if you are a google, you needed to work this bureaucracy IT was like highly political. You know you had hundreds of other researchers, all of whom were all as smart as you. And you have a finite sort of limited set of computer.

And you know what you would find is that um google would do really breathtakingly amazing work. But then you have like thirty different authors, you know and if you read the paper, there be like the sort of like strange things that seem like IT was a little bit tacked on. But that's the only way you could get the computer resources to actually pull off a training run on, like the model that you wanted to do, like you have to do some weird things to accommodate like people who were gna commit their training resources for there, like a random little thing. And so it's funny to see that you know human progress is more or less a little bit uh, impeded by the bureaucracy and lack of governance and lack of agency that large organizations just sort of like impose on people like you don't have a choice .

isn't IT crazy. That I was easier for them to invent, discover transformers and and this largely little breakthrough then IT was for them to navigate the bureaucrat acy to actually like, create a product out of this, or do IT to useful with IT like that should tell, you can know everything you need to know.

I I mean, the wild thing is, like, even with an OpenAI, like they did everything right. Like gp. Three was very impressive. Three point five was even more, four was incredible. But like, they were gonna put IT behind an A P I and like explicit for many years opening eye was supposed to be a you we're research lab not a product company and um you know IT took the relatively herculis and efforts by product people inside open eye to even release um you know ChatGPT which turned out to be the greatest consumer launch of maybe the in the history of consumer launches. This is actually .

hey you said um and and I know we got a at a second but you said you keep talking about the same and is pretty mazing about, uh, talking to the smart people and like what where do they where do they talking about? You have access to more those types of people than probably most anyone on earth what's the conversation right now or is that is IT .

all A I still yeah I mean, ultimately, that sort of the number one thing that we are pretty excited about, I mean that you know, a few people who really smart can sit in a room and, I mean, make a thing that literally does what humans do all day. You know, I I would make a pitch that often the best things that could be automated are actually very route. They're sort of the knowledge worker equivalent of like hand looming ing a carpet or something. It's like all I do all day is look at an email box, see if someone paid their bill, reconcile that against a ledger in quick books like can you imagine, you know millions of people like tens of millions of people on the planet like that's there, nine to five you know like that that is not a good use of, uh, very smart human being, a generally speaking and like those are sort of the things that are most easily replaced by really great prompting great evils. And Frankly, I think um you know they're gonna be twenty person software engineering focused startups that basically turn on year billions of dollars in payroll into billions of dollars in software revenue and hopefull those people go on to do much smarter and much more interesting jobs than like passing butter .

all day amain. Gary, if you have one minute, can you tell the spoon bending story? I think this is the a very powerful story that you have the spoon bending party. I don't know you.

god. And I mean, i've been a burning men a few times. I love burning man. It's my favorite plays to take a break from consensus reality and realized that it's all made up. But you get to make IT up and know there's a lot of like weird fringe stuff, a lot like sixties, like esoteric, you know ah you just wandering around the desert on our bike with your bodies and you know I think a we randomly walked into a spoon bending party.

Where are there? You know, there was a huge group of, I think is almost like a magician at the front, like of helping people in the the stick was that they were gone to teach you how to bend a spoon with your mind. Like, okay, that's cool.

Like, let's go check IT out they passed out these spoons um and then IT was like a magic trick they said, uh okay now then you're spoon with like look at your spoon and bend IT with your mind and then in between they would say, like okay, well, sometimes you need to use your hands and like warm up the spoon to bend IT and then basically um I think what you're supposed to do literally is just bend the spoon with your hands and that's what and then what's funny is by the end of IT um half of the people like I I had a Better spoon because I was like, oh yeah like they said, like oh I should sort of warm up the spoon with my hands and bend IT with my hands and started started yeah yeah just to get this started right and then by the end, like half of the room had Bensons ons and the other half didn't and the ones that didn't like how did you do that's absolutely incredible and I was like, guys, it's a bit, it's a bit. You have to you know first know that you can bend the spoon with your mind, but then you bend IT with your hands. Guys like this literally like the stick, actually.

And it's a little bit of an allegory for, uh, you know, bias to action and and what you're supposed to do in real life, like real life, is sort of like this exercise. Like they say, like you can go change the world and you can do IT with your with your very ideas, but like you know, that alone is not enough. Like you actually have to go with your hands and go top to users and you know, sit and build a thing.

And so, you know, don't forget the second half and the wildest thing is like more than half of the room could not do IT. And so if you are the person who is able to bend, bend the spoon with your mind, I guess what you also use your hands like you got got to do that, you know and I actually like that. Maybe like the greatest gift is just like.

there you're the shit man. You are the best. I love talking to you. You make me feel, uh, really great. You give me energy and um we're very, very, very thankful that you took the time to do this.

Thank you guys so much for having me. Always great to see you guys and you know congrats to all the success and excited to see where you and your community go. I think we're all build in the future out here.

Thank you for .

saying. That take. Travel, never looking back.