<human>: No, for sure not. And I think that the, probably the last thing is kind of in this world of Web3, right? And you've talked about this a lot. Web3 opens up so many possibilities because it's the idea that everything could be rebuilt.  And what couldn't be more exciting to a young founder coming into a world that feels like everything's been built, to be told, oh no, everything's going to be rebuilt in this way.  The challenge is like, that's a very theoretical concept, right Dalton? Like, how do you dig a little deeper? You wanna put that into practice.
<bot>: And ideally you wanna, ideally you have something deeper than, and so therefore we're gonna add tokens or therefore something, something NFTs. Like the bar is higher. And again, speaking of NFTs, remember OpenSea, I interviewed those guys. I remember doing office hours with them. And what I will tell you is OpenSea was not theoretical.  They launched, they had users, they had graphs, they made money. It was actually something that made sense and wasn't all wishful thinking.
</s>


<human>: You're doing pretty well.
<bot>: Yeah. When Shopify was a brand new thing, like all of these platforms, the people that were the first to recognize that these were, gave them leverage.
<human>: Yes.
<bot>: Those entrepreneurial minded people did really well.
</s>


<human>: But what if they say no?
<bot>: talk to them, and they're like, no, I don't think so. What often happens, again, to go deep on this, is that the way they'll pitch the person is they'll pitch them their idea. They'll be like, I'm an idea guy. I've got a great idea. Do you want to be my worker bee to go do all my ideas? And of course, the person that's the best person you've ever worked with does not want to sit in a cage.  and do all of the work that you give them. And instead, I'm like, well, have you asked them if they have startup ideas? And then you sell yourself where you can come together, come up with the idea together as co-owners. And it's shocking how often that appears to have never occurred to someone. Like they think the idea of finding a technical co-founder is to find someone who will basically submit to their whims and be their assistant. To find an employee.
<human>: Yeah, and that's not the move, man. Trying to find a partner. You know, it's funny, because my dad would say this to me about my old co-founder, Justin Kahn. He was like, you know, Michael, Justin's an amazing recruiter. And I always thought, I was like, what's weird is I think if you're recruited by a good recruiter, you don't even realize they're a good recruiter, right? But like in hindsight, I'm like, all right, so we got me, Ahmed, and Kyle.  to work for him, well, not work for him, but to be his co-founders in a startup where he was wearing a camera on his head streaming his life 24-7. Named after him.
<bot>: Yes. Named after Justin. Named Justin.TV. Do you want to work at my startup? Yes. It's me. Yes.
</s>


<human>: Here's one.
<bot>: Let's imagine that you want to work on a new real estate related software company. That's your startup idea. And in category A, let's say that you  have 10 years of experience working as one of the founders was a real estate agent. One of the founders worked at a mortgage underwriting company for 10 years and built software around mortgage underwriting. They have a startup idea and they're like, we think that mortgage underwriters want X.  What should we do to validate this? It's like well You probably are right or like your your judgment about Knowing what mortgage underwriters want if you've been building software inside of a mortgage underwriting company for 10 years It's probably pretty good. I'm pretty good and you probably know way more than the average Barry about this You've probably tried other products. Yeah, you've probably been disappointed. You know what vendors are available Yeah, why things work and why you know, yeah, and so those kinds of people should probably trust their gut quite a bit Yeah about what mortgage underwriters want.
</s>


<human>: I think there's another thing going on too, which is fear based. Right. Like, I know that if I choose a bad deal, I'm going to waste a lot of time.
<bot>: Yeah.
<human>: Shouldn't I do all of this analysis first to make sure I don't choose, to make sure I don't choose a bad idea.
<bot>: Right. Yeah, we see this a lot where there's companies that find real problems and something they're experts in, but they are facing crippling anxiety that it's not venture scale. Yes, they might be right, but they're so obsessed with this way of thinking that, oh, what if this tops out at 50 million ARR? Gee, I'm just not even going to start a company. I'm going to stay doing, I'm gonna stay at my job because the idea I have will top out at 50 million in revenue.
<human>: Yeah, I think it's tricky because I think that we have to admit in the startup game you're going after like a high risk, low information and high commitment bet and there aren't moves to change those core things. Right like, yeah, you can invest in the margin, but it's still gonna be high risk, high commitment and a long term bat.
<bot>: Yep.
<human>: And so I think we would argue it's better to kind of focus on areas of your strength, areas that you know well, like that's where you can.
<bot>: Problems that you know a lot about that you personally observed that maybe you've.
</s>


<human>: So this is a product that's being marketed to people.  not companies. Sometimes these products are free and monetized with ads. Social networks are extremely common. Sometimes these products are paid products. The whole gig economy I would describe as a consumer business. But you know it's a consumer business because individual people use it and it's a product that's not primarily marketed to businesses. That's where you know you're in the consumer world.
<bot>: Yeah, and there's some nuance here, folks on the internet, so we don't need to get into a semantic debate. We're just trying to, just go with us on this definition. Just bear with us here, even if there's some nuance to debate about this.
</s>


<human>: OK, here's another one, right? Well, VCs, they care.  We all know that Google engineers can just raise a series A, can raise five to $10 million with almost nothing. This is my path to getting funded.
<bot>: I mean, it depends on, I mean, certainly depending on your resume, it could be helpful. It's a good brand name to have. So I don't think that's...  false, but I think at some point, the more time you spend there, what was once a good positive signal could turn into a negative one. Again, I can't speak for all investors, but at some point, you lose the shininess of getting that validation, as well as what team you're on and all this other good stuff. And so, you know, I think there's some truth to that is what I'm saying, but like, if you stay there for eight years, that doesn't apply anymore. You kind of have to get out to get the benefit of it.
<human>: I also think there's this weird feeling,  I think people will read TechCrunch and see, oh, these Google people are getting funded, and then kind of assume VCs are like walking the halls, like being like, engineer, here's term sheet. The flow that you walk through to work to like go to MIT and be a CS major and then get employed at Facebook is nothing like the flow you'd walk through to go from a Facebook engineer to raising money. Like, these are not the same flow, and I think people really mistake those. This is one of my big talking points to founders in the batch, which is,
<bot>: you don't read about the unsuccessful fundraisers. And so if all you read is the successful fundraisers, it looks like everyone is raising and every Google engineer is raising and every, because we just never hear about the ones that didn't happen.  And so, don't fall for that. It's not that easy. You can't just wave a magic wand and they're not just handing out, you know, we say this they won't believe this Michael but like I think people actually think they just hand out.  party favors or something. Oh, yeah, you work at Google?
</s>


<human>: All right, this is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. And today we're going to talk about dealing with setbacks. Needless to say, in both of our startups, we experienced a wide variety of setbacks. And I think working with so many startups over the last 10 years,  What's probably become most obvious to us is how I don't think I've ever seen founders who don't get hit with a lot of punches. Like dodging the punches, impossible. Like even, I'll phrase it another way. You might dodge some of the punches, but some of the punches are gonna land. So this is gonna be a bit of a talk about what types of punches land and what you might have to deal with if you're in this game for a long time.  What do you think, Dalton? Did y'all have a couple punches land over the years?
<bot>: Yeah. I mean, that was my experience as a founder, was taking punches constantly. And I think what comes up in office hours with me a lot, man, is I think people want to talk to me about one specific thing and asking for advice about that thing.  And I'm happy to do it. But a lot of what I want to encourage them to think about is the meta thing, which is that the thing will keep happening over and over again. And so developing a set of skills of identifying a situation of like, oh, this is one of these where like something bad happened and approaching it as part of like the sunrises, the sunsets.  Bad things happen. You know, like it's this is this is as much a part of of being a startup founder as literally anything else versus thinking you you're never going to have them or that each each setback is different. They're not. They just come just like every sunrise comes. Right.
</s>


<human>: So if all of this stuff's great, why are people so pessimistic?
<bot>: hard to have perspective, man. I think when you're really caught up in the moment, everything gets polarized into political stuff or tribal warfare about who's on what team. And so if your team is the thing, pushing for the thing, you celebrate it. But if the other team is, it's bad.
<human>: So it's very, everything is polarized. Yes. I also think there's this weird expectations game, right? Like,  It's magical thinking to think that we get all the things we spent the first chunk of the video talking about and there's nothing bad.  That's magical, that's like, that's not being an adult. There's gonna be trade-offs. There's gonna be trade-offs, right? Like, the trade-off on having, you know, 60 second videos that are exactly what I want, that I can swipe anytime I want, is like, you know, maybe two hours of swiping, I should be going to bed, you know? Like, there are a lot of different trade-offs. And like, I just feel like when people,  treat themselves like children versus treat themselves like adults. It's like, you know, a child doesn't acknowledge that trade-offs exist, right? A child can think magically.
<bot>: They want only the perfect. You know, it has to all be good with no bad.
<human>: With no bad, yes.
<bot>: Cut the crust off. Exactly. Cut the crust off, right?
<human>: And for a while, adults kind of create that world. And then after a while, adults explain to the kids, like, that's, I can't. Cut the crust off the world.
<bot>: Or like, you need to cut your own crust off. I mean, if you want to do that, you can.
<human>: But I'm not doing that anymore. No.  The world has crossed. And technology has crossed. Technology with the good comes some bad. So that's a big one. I also think that there's this weird thing where the pacing is inconsistent. Sometimes you get a lot of innovation in one part of the economy, and then sometimes you get a lot of innovation in another part of the economy.  it's not reliable.
<bot>: And so, you know, people- And it's so easy, it's this debate thing where you can say, well, what about X problem? Like, no matter what good thing happens, and they're not wrong, what about X? Like, you're right, X is a problem. Like, that's totally fair. But if you want to tear down anything interesting that happens by saying, well, X over here isn't solved yet, it's easy to just get trapped in the mud.
<human>: You tear down everything. Yeah. Right.  So I'll say this, right? In Reflection, you know, we both have young kids and  I am super excited that my kids get to grow up now. I cannot wait for the day where my daughter and son say like, oh, 45 minutes to Tokyo, that's so fucking slow. I can't wait. This isn't so great.
<bot>: What's so great about that, Michael?
<human>: It's really rocky. It's a bumpy ride.  I am so excited about the world that they're gonna join, and I'm confident they're gonna get even more over the next 80 years than we're getting, which is really fun.
<bot>: And think about it, we all, you all, get to create this future. And there's this thing where it's cooler and edgier and more punk rock to be like everything is bullshit.  And that's a good high horse to be on if you want to be cool. But if you're actually building things and you want to be a part of creating it, it's much easier and more fruitful to be optimistic and think about all the things you can do and think about what you personally can do and what you can work on versus just being like, burn it all down because of X. Well, you know, I was thinking about it.
<human>: If you really care about those problems, you have to be optimistic to try to solve them.  And some of the people who are the biggest social critics or the biggest revolutionaries or the biggest change agents in our society were default optimistic. Because they believed it could work.
<bot>: They believed the effort wasn't a waste of time.
<human>: You have to believe enough to invest yourself into something. Exactly. And so I'm willing to bet none of your heroes  were the cool snarky folks who never did anything and just bitched about how the world was wrong. None of your heroes were that. And so don't be one of those people. You can choose to not be one of those people. All right, great chat.
<bot>: Great, thanks.
</s>


<human>: This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. And today we're going to talk about how do you give more than you take from your users? Maybe we should start with kind of a business 101, right? Like MBA in 30 seconds. What do you think?
<bot>: Okay, so the basic idea underpinning all technological progress, business, very basic stuff is if you sell someone a tool,  And if they can use the tool to make more money than the tool cost them, you're creating value when people like it. And so, you know, some very basic examples, Google, when they first launched Google ads, it was very easy to buy Google ads.  you would pay Google per click, and you could sell stuff for way more than you paid Google. So you would just do that all day long and make tons of money, right? Very straightforward. Makes sense. Talk about Excel and Microsoft Office.
<human>: Microsoft Office is a perfect example. If you think about Word, you think about Excel, these are products that made normal office workers and normal kind of financial workers literally 10 to 100 times more productive. Yeah. And so if you can make an employee 10 times more productive,  People probably buy that tool.
<bot>: Buying a computer back in the 80s was expensive, and buying VisiCalc or whatever was expensive, but it was still way positive ROI, like 5 grand, 10 grand, no sweat, because spreadsheets made them better.
</s>


<human>: Everyone talks about rockets and going to space.  When rockets are reliable you can go anywhere in the world in 45 minutes like we could commute to Tokyo. Yep  When that happens, it changes the world in so many ways. In the 90s, we were watching space shuttles go up. Half of the shit in that space shuttle basically getting ejected into the freaking ocean. Whenever you did the math, it was like, oh, that cost us more than building a rocket from scratch and blowing it up. That's where we were in the 90s. Now, we actually have a path to  I can go anywhere in 45 minutes. It's pretty cool.
<bot>: And again, what this makes me think of, I don't have this graph handy, so I hope I'm not misquoting. But I remember the graph being references of the cost per pound to put something in space. And it looks like Moore's law, where what's happening is that there's this Moore's law looking graph.  on how much cheaper it is getting to put something into orbit and how, if you just believe in the Moore's law continuing to happen here, the amount of cool stuff that will happen in space in 5, 10, 20 years, it's just mind-blowing.
<human>: And we're at that moment where it's getting interesting.
<bot>: It's happening today. Yeah, exactly.
</s>


<human>: Oh, man. All right. Well, to wrap this up, bad things are going to happen. Your reaction is completely under your control. Use it as an opportunity to get better at taking punches and be the example for the people around you. By up-leveling yourself, you can up-level your team, too. All right, man. Great chat.
<bot>: Sounds good. Thanks, man.
</s>


<human>: The next one is...  Dalton, and this is a little more vague, like it's gonna be easier for me to be successful at my startup. I'm gonna learn important lessons I can apply to my startup if I work for a while at Faang, right? Because the lessons I learned at a big company can directly apply to my early stage startup, right? Isn't that how it works?
<bot>: Look, I think in some situations, folks that are really green can learn a lot about working on a team and having a manager, learning about how corporations work, learning about politics. It's a great way to learn about politics. But you'd be surprised at how many founders that we talk to  will tell you that nothing they did in their job translates at all to their startup. Like could not be less relevant versus their college coursework was more relevant. Isn't that weird? Like, and it's because in a lot of things we have so much tooling. Again, I'm talking about programmers here, but you have so much infrastructure inside of Google or Facebook to do your job. And they have their own way of doing code reviews. Like there's just all this stuff. So when you start a startup and you have none of it and you're starting from scratch, you're like, wait,  What happened to all those tools I was used to using in Bigtable and BigQuery and whatever you had? And you're dependent on those tools. And so it's a lot more like doing a college project again, where there's no tooling, there's no infrastructure. You have to create everything from scratch. And so again, what's funny is you learn a lot of stuff, but a lot of what you learn is how to use the tools of the thing, which you don't get to use when you don't work there anymore. Get what I'm saying? Again, this is a very programmer-centric point, but like,  I've seen founders run into this problem a lot.
</s>


<human>: Well, I think it starts with, we're all consumers.  We are all consumers and we are being marketed products basically our whole lives. And so often when we think about the problems in our lives or we think about the problems that interest us, they tend to be things that we would use or we think we would use or we think our friends would use. That's a big one. What are others?
<bot>: I think that when we know stories about other founders or about startups, most of the stories we know are about consumer founders and consumer startups and consumer successes. So you think about the hero worship of Steve Jobs or  Mark Zuckerberg or whatever. And it's hard not to think about these people because they build products we all use every day. Like if you spend your time watching television and looking at apps and looking at your iPhone for most of your waking hours, it's hard not to be thinking about consumer app ideas, right? Like I get it. I get where it's coming from.
<human>: We rarely meet a founder that's in love with Cisco or Oracle, you know? And that makes sense. Yeah, exactly.
<bot>: And so I think we get told these stories. And so I think by default, if you're thinking about starting a company, you by default come up with consumer ideas because it's what you know. It's what you think every startup is as a consumer, especially if you're not as familiar with how the startup world works.
</s>


<human>: Now, what about when maybe you shouldn't trust your gut?
<bot>: I think one way to self-diagnose that maybe, yeah, your gut instinct may not be dead on is where you find that you don't have a lot of opinions about what to work on.
<human>: Yeah.
<bot>: Or that your opinions are very...  Mid? No, I'm just kidding. Where your opinions are just very similar to the 50th percentile of other people. Mainstream. Mainstream. And so it'd be like, oh, well, you know, all the jobs you've had are just very high level. You never went deep on any particular topic where you just haven't had that many jobs. Yeah. Is an example.
<human>: Yeah.
<bot>: And you just don't have a lot of preferences. Or to the extent you have preferences, they're the same as everyone else.
</s>


<human>: I also think though that there's another way I see a lot of founders attacking this. A lot of founders just think this way from first principles. Good VC's pick good companies and can predict the future. If I can model a good vc in my head, I will pick a good idea and increase the likelihood of winning. And it's interesting to me because I think that like, this is sometimes what I hate about first principles arguments is that like, sure, if you say it that way, it makes sense. Do you think that's what good VC's really do?
<bot>: Yeah, I mean, I think, look, to be really direct on that, what do I think great investors do, especially later stage, than what Y combinator is? They, they find companies that have product market fit that are taking off, that have incredible traction and they try to find them and invest in them. And that's the job. Just like in a lot of these other m and a, all these other types of finance jobs, it's usually you find the thing that's making lots of money, that's doing really well and then you glom onto it and attach yourself to it.
<human>: And the skill is often getting the thing, taking off to take your money versus someone else's money, not picking amongst things that haven't launched yet, and having theses about why one's going to do better than the other.
<bot>: Exactly.
<human>: So unfortunately, when people are doing that other type of investing, investing really early. I worry that there isn't a lot founders can learn from investors in that early stage investing.
<bot>: Once you take off, there's less to learn. We're admitting that once you have a hockey stick, tons to learn from that. But if you're like, I don't know what idea to work on.
<human>: Exactly. Exactly.
<bot>: That's a few steps ahead of where you are.
</s>


<human>: So, to wrap this up, let's come back to the message kind of in the beginning. How do you have balance in this world? Like how do you, like we say balance, but aren't these, aren't these, my balance is, I think this is a good idea, but it's going to be really hard and clear evidence for this is going to take a while to develop. These are kind of hard to balance, right?
<bot>: Yeah. I mean,  I talk about the term cognitive dissonance sometimes, which again, it's another psychology term. Cognitive dissonance is when you have two conflicting ideas that you have to hold onto at the same time. And most human beings don't like cognitive dissonance. It makes them uncomfortable to hold conflicting ideas at the same time. And I think the best founders have techniques and they can do it. And they can be really good at it.  something to aspire for as a founder is someone who can know both, oh no, like my star employee just quit and says my startup is horrible and now I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I'm gonna get on this sales call and I'm gonna sell my heart out and like close this customer. And I have to kind of like sit with both of like, I have to be able to do this and not go nutso.  And like, it's hard, okay? Like, cause like every day there's gonna be crises of some sort, right? And there's gonna be victories and the people that screw this up, they like, they can't handle that dissonance and they go too far. The way they resolve the dissonance is to go too far one of the directions of either like freaking out of the bad things or losing contact with reality more or less, you know?
<human>: A lot of founders I know, I wouldn't describe them as totally enjoying that experience, but I would say that they figure out how to thrive in that environment. Like they execute in that environment and the risk and danger in some ways sharpens them. And how many times do we see founders like not bring their true A game  until like shit's pretty bad. Yes. Yes. Um, so there you go. So that's the blueprint, right? Be optimistic. Just don't be magically optimistic.
<bot>: Yeah. Be rooted in reality. Squarely rooted in real reality.
<human>: All right, man. Great talk.
<bot>: Sounds good. Thanks.
</s>


<human>: Any other things that have made you productive as a manager?
<bot>: The number one thing that I do that I realize that a lot of the other successful founders did too,  was I had my analytics dashboard or whatever was important KPIs on the business up on my screen 24-7 and I would stare at it all the time. And I actually can memorize. I even, this is even the case for YC, man. I don't even know if you know this, but like a lot of our internal stats I have memorized.
<human>: Yes.
<bot>: And it's because I stare at them all the time and no one told me to do that. This is just a me thing.  But I'm obsessed with the internal key KPIs for anything I'm working on. I'm just an addict to look at that stuff.
<human>: I think that that is such, what we see on the other side, and I completely agree with you, that was a huge thing. Especially for my second startup, that was a really huge thing. It's funny when you talk to a founder who knows their stats well, they just talk about their stats so differently.  First of all, they don't round off numbers to the nearest zero. But second of all, they know whether they're up or down 10% at any given time. Whereas other founders are just like, yeah, I think it was an up week.  And it's like, how do you not know? How do you not know if your revenue went up this week? How do you not know that?
<bot>: What are you doing? Yeah, no, I don't get it. I don't get when someone is operating a business, and it's like, what was our revenue last month?
</s>


<human>: So I have personal experience with this one. And I think for the longest time I agreed. Like I was like, yes, this needs to exist. And as I got older, I learned something that was slightly depressing, but is proven to be true. The magical place doesn't exist, right? Like there is a finite number of restaurants that are open tonight. That's it.  And like you wanting there to be a better option doesn't mean that a better option exists. And I think this is what's so tricky is that like the world seems limitless, but for these physical things, it's actually fairly limited. Every day, people go on Yelp, search the restaurants in their neighborhood.  don't like what they find and are frustrated. But that doesn't mean that there are restaurants that they don't know about. That just means that what exists is not sufficient. And ditto for parties, dittos for events and concerts and da, da, da, da. And I think, you know, this is an honest, it's an honest mistake, right? It's a very honest mistake because there is a problem. I don't like the restaurants in my neighborhood or my city, right?
<bot>: I've spent years of my life working on music discovery.  And I understand the problems. One of the problems is that we think that the other users are like us and people like to say they want to discover new music. But in practice, people like popular music from a small number of bands. Just like with restaurants. Do you know what? Something we've learned from DoorDash over the years.  is most people order like McDonald's and stuff.
<human>: Like the average user- Or the comparable, or the burger from somewhere else.
<bot>: That's what people like. They're not ordering like really esoteric, strange dishes.  And this is one of those things where I'm sure there's people that are gonna see this video and be like, you're wrong. The thing with these ideas is it makes people emotional and it makes them wanna debate or it makes them wanna, like something about it makes you feel like you figured something out and the world is wrong and you have the vision. There's something weird about this. And these discovery startup ideas really bring this out in founders. And again, we've been there. I've worked on this stuff. I get it.  And so again, we're saying if you're working on this kind of stuff or interested in it, do a lot of research and understand that the reason those that came before you, it's not that they're stupid. It's not that they've never thought of this before. It's not that they haven't shipped anything before. Like, just realize that's the tar pit talking. It's like, oh, this looks like a nice pool of water. No one's here drinking at it. I'm going to go get a drink of water from this pool, right? Like, no, danger, quicksand.  Right?
<human>: Dalton, I must be the first person who've ever discovered this pond.
<bot>: Michael, I just realized that Gen Z doesn't like Facebook very much. I just invented this idea. No one has ever thought of this before.  No one's ever. Yeah, the bar is higher folks.
</s>


<human>: This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. Today we're going to talk about how overthinking is sometimes a founder's biggest mistake. So, Dalton, this video was triggered by this amazing meme that you made on fundraising advice. But before we get to the meme, because I think it's, like, one of the best memes I've ever seen for fundraising advice.
<bot>: For fundraising.
<human>: Let's start in general. Let's start in general. How can overthinking be bad? And when can overthinking be bad?
<bot>: Yeah, I mean, I think that what people think being a founder is. Is what they saw in, like, watching the Facebook movie or popular television, where, you know, you're, like, coding a lot and, you know, you're making deals and screwing over your friends. Just kidding. But in reality, it's a lot of feeling lost and being not sure what to do and feeling stressed out a lot, and you're worried all the time. And so you tend to overthink everything and every decision. You kind of think in circles over and over and over again because you don't have a boss, you don't have constraints when you're a startup founder, right? There's no one really telling you what to do, so you're on your own. And so when you. The experience of being a startup founder, it's to always be overthinking everything.
</s>


<human>: So this is Dalton plus Michael, and today we're going to talk about why the best investors secretly love YC. Very secretly.  Set this up for us, Dalton.
<bot>: Yeah, so the key word here that Michael is saying is secretly. Because if you talk to a lot of investors, if you read their blog posts and social media, a recurring theme is, you know.
<human>: YC sucks.
<bot>: Maybe it's, you know, YC OK, if you must. But it's not as good as just going directly to our funds, because we're number one, and you should raise from Koalapop.  And so we are very used to seeing this, and we often get questions about this from founders, which is like, hey, I heard from Investor X that they said that doing YC doesn't make sense for me. What's your guys' response to that? Often while passing, by the way. Yeah, no, that's the best part, is of course the investor's not investing in them either. And so they just leave them with a parting gift. And so what we wanted to talk about in the video today is,  what's actually going on, and the fact is the top investors invest in YC companies a lot. All the time. All the time. And there's a bit of a gap between what they will say to folks that they are passing on and how they actually behave as investors. So we're going to jump into that.
</s>


<human>: Well, let's dig into that, right? So in some ways,  We're kind of providing a service to VCs, and what do you think the VCs are consuming here? Why do you think they like to invest in YC?
<bot>: The major reason a normal venture capitalist would not invest in a startup is that it's too early. And too early just means there's not enough  signal that this is one of these epic standout companies, which is their job to invest in. The average VC only does one deal a year, maybe two deals a year. And the average firm has, what, five to 10 partners? There actually just aren't that many slots of deals to do. And so the feedback is generally, this is too early for us, right? The service that YC provides is it is a very hopeful filter.  for what is good and worth paying attention to. By getting the YC stamp on it, we are filtering it, we're doing that job for them.
<human>: We're taking, what is it, 20,000 applications? Yes. And turning it into 200-something companies.
<bot>: And even then,  they can get to know the YC companies and keep filtering even after that. And so having any kind of signal is very helpful. In addition, the fact that we get the company's finance so they don't just run out of money. What often happens when you're going to raise from VCs, they say, this is too early.  And the founder's like, well, we're too early for them. And you know, we don't want to do YC. And so then it just shut down. The company doesn't exist. And so to the extent that YC just gives these companies money to have a shot at getting far enough along for VC to invest, that is a helpful service. In addition, the advice and the network we give the companies, helping them with sales, helping them with pitching, helping them pivot. A lot of these companies on our top 100 list are companies that  pivoted during YC. And that's a value-added service we're providing to the investor market is giving these companies an avenue to change their idea.
</s>


<human>: So, Dalton, one of the most perfect examples of this is actually Elon Musk, and why I think it's so perfect is that, depending on how you tell the story, Elon looks like the dummy or the idiot. Right? Like, I'm sorry, the dummy or the genius. Right. Depending on how you sell the story. And it almost doesn't matter. Right, because he's winning. But, you know, to me, the first example that I always loved is that, you know, I read some book about the starting of SpaceX, and it started with Elon going to Russia trying to buy, like, rockets. And, like, the Russian government being like, there's this American billionaire guy who wants to buy rockets and kind of not believing it, but Elon just looking really serious, so they, like, considered it, and, like, they eventually said no. But, like, he got to talk to people about buying rockets from them. He's just a dude with money.
<bot>: He was like, go to Russia, buy rockets. Like, that's the extremes. Is that genius or stupid? I can't tell.
<human>: I can't tell.
<bot>: And, like, with Tesla itself, like, to me, the midwit is. Is electric cars are good. That's the extreme. Electric cars good or on both? In the middle, it's like, no one has successfully done a startup car company since the fifties. And every. You know, if you look at all prior attempts to build an electric car.
<human>: Like, there's all these words and the infrastructure. Yeah. Yes. And I think that the one that we find most funny, which we'll see this video. We'll see if we stand the test of time is, is the boring company, right. Drilling holes under the ground so that you can drive places faster is very clearly the idiot one, but, like, it could be the genius one, too.
<bot>: Yeah. It's exact. It's a beginner's mind idea, which is, like, traffic is bad. What if we dug a hole under the ground to get to downtown Las Vegas? And what's funny is you read all the critiques of this. Like, the Midwest stuff's like, whoa, bus systems already exist, and it might be much more efficient to optimize transportation. You know, there's lots of words in the middle of that, but, you know, drill tunnel to avoid traffic is certainly at the extremes.
<human>: Yeah, yeah.
<bot>: And you kind of see him approach all of his problems this way, where you can imagine it being the same sort of ideas that we like. Mars is cool. Like, yeah, Mars is cool. Like, this is the kind of stuff we come up with, as teenagers, like, a lot of his ideas.
<human>: Yes. And the hard work is in the implementation, but the idea isn't very complicated. And, like, the v one is kind of simple minded.
<bot>: And if he was an overthinker, he would do. He would rule all the stuff out. All this stuff is, like, obviously a bad idea. And anyone in the Midwest territory would rule out all these ideas.
<human>: Yes.
<bot>: Right?
</s>


<human>: And then the last one, we see a lot of people trying to hedge their bets. So many people trying to be like, well, I'm keeping grad school open, I've got a Google job offer, I've got a Jane Street or whatever the new tech finance thing of the minute is, and I'm talking to three friends about doing a startup.  And I'm kind of moving all those pieces down the board at the same time. And we get asked questions like, okay, so how do I optimize this? I'm like, I don't think you can be great at those four things at the same time. It's hard enough to be great at one of those things. But once again, why shouldn't I hedge Delta? Isn't the optimal move to hedge? How do I know I'm making the right decision?
<bot>: when you're taking a high risk.  life decision, like we said on this video series a number of times, you're going to look stupid and you're going to take risk and there's a chance you're going to be like, that was a huge mistake. And you want to barter with the universe. You want to be like, come on, can't I de-risk this? You want to think that you can be smarter than the system to somehow give up nothing and have no downside and only have upside.  And the more you try to barter with the universe to be like, okay, first I'll get a job at Google and I'll save money and then I'll do, you know, I'll invest in crypto and then I'll do like, you want to like barter with the universe to have no risk. And I guess like,  I get where people are coming from. I'm not sure that's a real thing. And I think it's being more real with yourself is like, yeah, I'm taking risks. Like, yeah, quitting my job at Google is a risk. And I may regret it, but I may not. But I'm doing this with eyes wide open. And by actually putting my full heart into anything I do, whatever that is, including not quitting my job,  That's, how can you have regrets about that? Being proud of the work you do. I mean, this is what I tell a lot of folks. I do a lot of office hours with people that are shutting down. I did one today. You know, it's like their final office hours because they're shutting down their startup. And I tend to tell people similar stuff, which is like, look, if you're proud of the job you did,  You know, if you had heart and you gave it your all, and you feel like you learned stuff, then great job. And you should view this as an affirmative experience. And so like, I'm proud of you, I'm proud of the job you did, I know you had your heart into this thing, and like, we'll get the next one.
<human>: You know? I think that that message has to be told because it is rewarding, but founders have to be kind of reminded that they didn't fail. Like it's not like,  Or let's just put it this way. It's not like failing a test, a basic math test that you just didn't study for. It's not like that. You tried to do something that so few people in the world are successful at. Failing is not really failing at all.
<bot>: It's like trying to be a pro athlete. Like when you're really good in college, you try to go pro and you like make a team and then you get cut in the first year. Like that's still pretty awesome. Yeah.
<human>: You still were maybe one of the best thousand people on earth who could play basketball.
<bot>: Yeah. And so it's like, you know, again, it would be great if you were number one in the world, but like people are going to respect what you did. And if you're proud in your heart of the work you did, then you will view this as a positive thing in your life, you know?
<human>: Yeah. And I always tell the people who are hedging, I always say this, the other side, you know, in our world, it's really competitive. And what happens if there's a team that's exactly as competent as you and they're not hedging? They're always going to win, you know, they're always going to beat you. So how much better do you have to be than that team if you're splitting your resources two ways, three ways, four ways like.  So it's not even a good strategy, even if you were trying to think strategically, unfortunately. So there you go. Those are some of the things that future billionaires do to get shit done, and some of the things that they avoid as well. Great chat.
<bot>: Sounds good. Thanks, man.
</s>


<human>: So you've got a theory about this whole game. Share the theory.
<bot>: Here's a theory I'd like to share with everybody. Let's think about founders and startups. Let's talk about supply and demand.  And the argument is this, there's many startup ideas that have very large supply of founders that would want to work on them. And there's some startup ideas with a very low supply of founders that want, and not just want, have the skillset to work on them. Still with me? So for instance, let's imagine the startup idea is one where as a consequence of being a founder, you party with celebrities and your job is to party with as many celebrities as possible.  I think the supply of founders that are excited about that, and again, a lot of this is the music discovery or the concert discovery. If your startup idea is, hey, I want to help people discover new concerts to go to, as a consequence of working on that startup idea, you're going to go to a lot of concerts and you're going to have a lot of fun. Yay. And so there is a huge pool of people out in the universe that would love to work on that startup idea. Okay. On the other side of the spectrum, the supply of founders that would want to build open source developer orchestration tools,  Pretty low. And for, and there's some people where that stuff is great. Like, right. It's just, it's not, you have to be technical. You have to be a programmer. Like there's all these like boxes and filters you have to pass through to think to yourself, I'm going to work on developer orchestration. You know, this is my passion.  And so that's on the supply side. Some ideas, a lot of people want to work on because it's cool and sexy and fun and you hang out with cool people. Some of them, you know, how many people could start a quantum computing startup? What's the set of people in the universe that could credibly start one of those, Michael? 20 people?
<human>: Hundreds.
<bot>: Okay. Yeah. No hundreds. Okay. So very small supply. Now let's talk about the demand side. Michael, what is the demand for an unlaunched, undifferentiated social app?  Zero. Right? Think about how many apps launch in the app store every day, folks. Hundreds? Thousands? I don't know. Most people don't search in the app store for apps that launch that day to download them and try them out.  People are busy, they don't care. And then also on the demand side, what's the demand for high quality software that solves a major business problem so that companies can run more efficiently in some industry? Really high.
<human>: Again, you have to know what industry you're talking about. Let's take your most expensive workers.  Yeah, let's take your most expensive workers and make them 50% more productive. Yeah.
<bot>: It's something like Retool, I guess, would be an example.
<human>: Yes, that sounds great.
<bot>: It's like, oh, here's a no-code tool to help you let your non-technical people effectively be coders to build all these dashboards. What's the demand for a product like that? Infinite. Yeah. People want that. And so I think what you... Yes. When we're talking about tar pit ideas, what we're describing is ideas that have the largest  over supply of founders that want to start them relative to market demand. And I think you can think about this in terms of like being on the job market or something. If you don't really have differentiating skills from other candidates, it's just going to be harder than if you have really differentiated, really special skills that stand out from the crowd.
<human>: I think what's interesting about this concept is how many founder, how many potential founders  are sitting somewhere with expertise and they don't think the startup world is for them. For example, we funded a mining software company from this founder in Australia who used to basically work for a mining company building software to tell the company how to deploy all this really expensive equipment and not lose money. And I think that there are probably hundreds of people like this founder  who would never think that the startup world is for them because they would think the startup world's for people making stuff for creators or social networks or da, da, da, da. I think this is almost a plea to people who are experienced and don't think they're startup people. It's like you might be a startup person. Like if you've solved an esoteric problem in a large industry or you have insight on it, you could be a startup person and solve that problem for the world.  you might have a more unique perspective than you think.
<bot>: Startups aren't exclusively apps to discover restaurants. Again, like no, there's too many of those.
</s>


<human>: PG in some ways designed YC a little bit that way, right? I think that's counterintuitive to a lot of founders. One, there aren't that many events. You don't have classes all day at YC. We try to take as little time as possible during your week so you can actually get shit done. Two, there's a hard deadline, demo day. And three, I think people are often surprised.  A good portion of what I see is just asking you, what are you gonna accomplish by demo day? And then asking you every week, well, did you do it? And it's you confronting the yes or no of that. It turns out that there's a lot of magic on that and he wanted to build as much maker time as possible in the program. I think in this kind of balance between maker mode and manager mode, what people should be trying to do is maximize their productivity when they're in that mode.  How do you maximize productivity? So when I think about manager mode, for me, I always like to think about this like, okay, if I'm gonna be managing my time between my to-do list, which is just another way of saying shit that's actually important to get done, meetings, email, and Slack, I always think that my to-do list comes first. Like whenever I'm being productive, I start at the to-do list.  And I do everything there, and then I check those things.
<bot>: Because you control it. Yes. Versus if it's inbox driven, other people are in control of your time, which is, watch out.
</s>


<human>: Anyways, this was an amazing batch, and I don't want YC to take too much credit here. The founders at the work, like we said, the founders at the work. And, you know, to one of the points you made earlier, being able to see everyone in person, this batch was also just like, amazing. You know, it was one of the things that reminded me about why this is such a fun job is being able to see everyone and interact with them throughout the batch. So this is a good one, right?
<bot>: This is good. We made it.
<human>: Yeah. We made it. We survived 20. We survived 19. Kind of nuts. Kind of nuts. All right, man, see you later.
<bot>: Sounds good. Talk to you later.
</s>


<human>: I think the last thing that I see a lot is that when you think like a VC, it is easier to get positive feedback from VC's. You know, when you talk, when you pick an idea because it's the hot thing on Twitter, it's easy to get meetings.
<bot>: Yep.
<human>: When you talk about companies using VC language, when you show some market slide that says this market is right, like, investors are responding to that. And I think that's confusing. To founders, because, I mean, investors can respond to things that aren't good.
<bot>: Yes.
<human>: In fact, wouldn't we say that's most of what they're responding? Like, that's our job. It's like most investors bet on things that don't work.
<bot>: Yeah, I mean, that is the job. And again, one way to detect this is that you spend all your time paying attention to fundraising trends, and the way you come up with a startup idea is to read what is raising money and then clone the thing that is raising the most money, and that's the algorithm.
<human>: And then maybe raise some money. And then what?
<bot>: Yeah, that is an algorithm. We see a lot from this type of thinking, which is all of these companies raise money. I'm going to do it too. And we're just suggesting we've seen that not go well a lot of the time.
</s>


<human>: Well, I'll tell you, I promise you, it wasn't that the idea was going to work. It was the adventure. Okay. It was the adventure. And I think what's so interesting, when people don't ask their friend,  And they assume, oh, but they work at this company. They're never going to do it, da, da, da, da. It's like they don't realize you're offering adventure. You're offering the unknown.
<bot>: And adventure isn't, here's my idea for a social network for dogs. Will you build my website? No.
</s>


<human>: Yeah, that's why they're interested. They bought a house.
<bot>: And they have some ideas of like, well, we think the real estate industry is broken and it's weird that it works this way. And so we just think we can fix it. And you kind of ask, well, what, you know, how much research have you done or how many people have you talked to in the industry? None.  And they don't know anyone. Again, these folks can still be successful. But those folks should probably trust their gut a little bit less that they know precisely what to build to get this off the ground.
<human>: I think that where we see this goes wrong is when the founder with expertise  is fearful and acts like the founder without. And the founder without expertise is too confident and acts like the founder with. And I can't say this enough, like I've seen so often the founder with expertise  where I'm like, you know so much about this. Well, be afraid. Maybe the thing I built was only, no one else will want it. Or like, maybe my taste is unique. Or here's one.
<bot>: Have you seen this one where, oh, I know what to build and they want it, but I don't think VCs will fund it.
<human>: Yeah.
<bot>: Like basically they're like, oh, okay. We actually know exactly what kind of software mortgage underwriters want.  But we're building some AI bullshit. Yes. Because we think we need to say it's AI related.
<human>: Yes, to raise money.
<bot>: Versus the thing that we know is actually the problem. Yes. That does not involve AI at all.
<human>: Yes. Like we're ignoring all of our expertise.
<bot>: Because it's not AI.
</s>


<human>: Investors and fundraising. The classic the classic. I went in fundraise with this expectation. I came out with a bloody nose and a black eye.
<bot>: Yeah, I thought I thought they liked me. I thought they were my friends. I thought I was special. I thought everyone else is raising, you know, everyone else is this. Oh, I I got all the right intros. I know they're interested in my thing. I did the networking like it's it's some version of. I.  Believed with good reason X was going to happen X did not happen WTF like like how dare they are the universe like you end up like going kind of nuts on feeling wronged by a person or a or a system or Whatever you want to call it like someone did you wrong, right?
</s>


<human>: This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. And today we're going to give advice on pivoting by discussing the startup ideas that founders most often pivot into and away from.  We call these ideas tar pit ideas. Dalton, explain the problem here. What's going on?
<bot>: So here's the deal. It's surprisingly, a lot of people's ideas are surprisingly the same across founders. And so when we read the thousands of applications that apply every batch, and we interview the thousands of companies every batch that we do, there's a lot of common ideas  And specifically what we're gonna be talking about today is tar pit ideas, and we'll explain what that means in a moment. But these are ideas that lots of people try, and they don't succeed, and they don't pivot back out of them quickly enough. So it's a cause of death for many, many, many, many companies, statistically, are some of these tar pit ideas. So I'll put this back to you, Michael. Michael, explain why we would use the word tar pit. What are we trying to say? What does that mean? I know you did some research here.
<human>: Yeah, did a little bit of Googling here. So a tar pit is a place where petroleum is kind of coming up and seeping up through the earth. And it tends to be a great place to find fossilized remains, dinosaurs, other forms of life. And the reason why is that apparently tar pit pools resemble freshwater ponds. And so animals will come across them,  Think it's fresh water. Step in. Get stuck because the tar is very sticky. Die. Start to decompose. That smell will attract more animals. And then you get this kind of cascading negative effect, which, as I say it out loud, describes the phenomenon in the startup world so perfectly. It's not even funny.
<bot>: Yeah, tar pit ideas.  attract founders to them. And they seem like good ideas. They seem like something people want. You know, it's ideas that are like very appealing. And the fact that there isn't already famous companies solving them already attracts more founders. Do you see what I'm saying? Like, it looks like you've come up with this amazing original idea and the death of everyone that attempted it is hard to see. And all you see is like a freshwater pool. You're like, oh, this is a wide open space for us to solve.
<human>: But right below the surface. Okay.
<bot>: Yeah, it looks good. Right? That's why it's so alluring. And so, and so look, why are we doing this talk? Or why are we telling you this? We would love for this not to happen to you. We would love to not see the tens of thousands of applications of people working on these really rough ideas.  And if you can manage to not fall into the tar pit yourself, your overall odds of success in your startup journey are much higher. That's why we're talking about this stuff.
</s>


<human>: Let's talk about the trap, right? So these are a lot of assumptions that future founders have. Let's talk about the other side. What's the company trying to do, right? And I think this is something that I hear a lot.  where the company is trying to retain you. And trying is not the right word. The company has engineered and iterated a system over oftentimes a decade plus to retain you. And when you sign that piece of paper, you have to understand you're going into the same retention flow or retention flow  built by a company that often is trying to retain users on its product. It's really good. It's highly gamified.
<bot>: It's highly gamified.
<human>: Highly gamified.
<bot>: Oh, I can get my next level, Michael. I want to get my next level upgrade. And then I unlock my booster pack, founder, blah, blah, blah, share, reward. And then I get level 14.
<human>: And one of the things that I see that founders don't realize is how the faangs will do this around equity. So here's a story that founders will tell me, right? I'm gonna get in, some kind of signing bonus, I'm gonna feel good. Some kind of signing, I'm gonna feel good. Some kind of equity package, I'm gonna feel good. I'm well compensated, this is great. And then I'm gonna get, but of course that equity is vesting over four years, right? Like, you know, you earn that equity a little bit of time over four years. So that's the first part of the trap, right? It's like if you leave,  you say goodbye to that money. The second part of the trap is that if you're good six months in, you get another chunk of equity, but it's vesting over four years. So think about it. You've been there for six months, but there's disproportionately more money that you have invested yet, which incentivize you to stay a little bit longer. This is a dark pattern.
<bot>: It's a loss aversion, which is people do a rash. If you give someone something and then threaten to take it away,  they will irrationally value it to avoid a loss. Versus they never had to begin with, they won't do it. Again, Google this, loss aversion is a thing. So there's a lot of stacked loss aversion around vesting.
<human>: Especially because founders will think of it as their savings. And this is the second part of the trap, right? You're around a lot of people who want to be employees and managers, not founders.  Oftentimes they're upscaling their lifestyle. Nicer apartment, car, nicer vacation, because they want to be in this world. They're not looking to save money to start their company, right? And so the people around you start spending money, especially because they see that vesting equity as almost savings.  So bam, you're not saving money because you're going on Instagram vacations. Bam, you continue to get these little equity bonuses that vest over four years. If they can keep you spending your entire salary and if they can keep the money that you have invested yet larger than the amount of money that you have in your savings by like two to three X, you never leave. Like your brain tells, like a rational human says, don't leave. Yeah. And again, where's this coming from?
<bot>: We talk to these people and they're like, yeah,  i hate my life but this is the setup like they explain this to us as like the reason they can't do the thing they want to do it's kind of sad to talk to someone who's like  They lay all this stuff out for us and they're like and therefore, you know, I can never do a startup And they're like 25 and it's like and this is how the math works I can't I can't I don't I'm not free.
<human>: I can't do it in many ways this is a defensive tactic to warehouse talent and  out of the fear that maybe someone else can use you in a way that can hurt the company. Whereas if they warehouse you on the Android setups team.  Yeah, think about it.
<bot>: It's like speculative science projects that get axed and that never ship. I saw that Facebook built some kind of silicon. They built a chip. And then they were like, no, nevermind. And they never shipped the thing that probably dozens of people spent years of their life on. I saw that PayPal had some kind of research lab. They just laid everyone off this week. Basically, if you're not on the core thing,  You have no promises that your work will ever turn anything. And how bad does it feel to spend five or six years and just, oh yeah, we were in the moonshots group. They decided not to do our thing. They shut down our group.
</s>


<human>: Now, here's another one that's a little controversial.  how to play the credential game. This one's tricky because I'd like to say we live in a world where credentials don't matter, but we don't live in that world, right? So how would you tell a high schooler to think about this game?
<bot>: There's the people that like love the system and embrace the system, like the teacher's pets. And then there's the people that see the system for what it is and they want to rage against the machine and destroy the system. And you know, I was a little bit more on that side.  God, yes, the Stanford kid.
<human>: Yeah, exactly.
<bot>: But the key thing is, I'm telling you, I'm talking a high school priest. I'm just trying to say, like, when you see this God in this, you see how the world works. Yes. You're like, man, this is like, not ideal. Yeah, I think there's one way to say yes.
<human>: I'm a little fucked up.
<bot>: And to the extent you can learn to work  to understand the rules of the game and play the game with credentials and realize that leveling up on the credential game will help you with your long-term goals. I think that's much better than like rejecting the system out of hand.
<human>: It's basically like either extreme is bad. Rejecting the...  Fundamentally, you understand the system is somewhat arbitrary, right? If you're smart enough, you understand that, right? So with that understanding, you can reject the system. And then like, because you don't have the right credentials, it'll hold you back. You can somehow not understand the initial point, think the system is the filter for merit completely.  and then get very disappointed later in life when you realize that all these credentials don't mean you're the smartest person in the room. Or you can try to get the system to work for you.
<bot>: Yeah, that's a great way to put it. It's a centrist philosophy, which is you acknowledge some of the shit. But also, if you opt out of it completely, you're kind of just hosing yourself.
</s>


<human>: One, this is the only thing that I would add to that is that you're the example. Like in so many things in startups, the punch in the face is the moment where you can still win points.  how you react influences how your co-founders react, how your employees react, influences how they will react when bad things happen to them. And so like the victory you can rescue out of the jaws of defeat for any of these setbacks is reacting in the way that you'd want everyone else around you to act, react.  And like in some fun ways, it's like if people see you taking punches, well, they'll learn how to take punches as well. And one day you're going to have a large organization and you're not going to be there to cover everyone.  they will have learned from you. They'll learn the good from you or the bad from you. They will learn from you. And I think that's what's fun. You know, sometimes this kind of stuff happens at YC and it's, I actually like, I love it. Like I love when people are freaking out and I'm like, oh, it's going to be fine.  Because it's like, it turns out freaking out doesn't help anyone. And it turns out if someone in the room is like, ah, it's going to be fine. Everyone pauses for moments like, well, fuck. Maybe it will be fine.
<bot>: To be really tactical, what I tell people to do is you do an inventory. And you're like, OK, are we running out of money?  Do we still have a product? Are we in legal trouble? Are we arrested? Where am I? Am I in jail? Could things have been worse? Is this recoverable? You just do an inventory where you check in, you reboot the whole machine,  And you're like, well, how bad is this? Because sometimes it is really bad. I'm not gonna lie to you. Sometimes it's real bad. But a lot of the times, you do this inventory, and you're like, okay, well, we have three years of runway, and you know, we can do this, okay. Oh, this isn't bad.
</s>


<human>: So let's get to the problem. There are a lot of founders out there that are building products that deliver no or minimum value to the user.  Classic fear is always like, well, I need to grow, right? The most important thing is to grow in order to raise money. And so I'm going to build something that kind of sucks.  because like, or screw that it sucks, right? Because most MVPs suck. I'm going to build something that doesn't solve anyone's problem and just try to get money for it so that I can go raise money. I think that's a good path.
<bot>: Yeah, it's like, it's make something VCs want. It's the classic perverted thing that we are not fans of where you're like, well, superficially this resembles a software product that superficially people pay for. And therefore we should charge a similar amount of money for it. And like,  Boom, boom. The specifics of what it does as details. You know, we've got our top folks on that.
</s>


<human>: I think there's another one, which is this fear of being a consultant. I think one of the reasons why people build shitty products that don't solve people's problems is that when they start talking to a user and the user starts saying, well,  here's my problem, I could really use this, this, and this. The founder starts thinking about that and thinking and fearing, what if this user is different from every other user?  What if the problem they have is different? And so what if I have to build something to make them happy? I have to build something that no one else wants. I think this is a core fear that happens, because I think that every founder in the back of their head, thank you, Reid Hoffman, is thinking, when can I get to blitzscale? Like, when can I raise the big round and throw this everywhere and have everyone use my thing? And every founder knows in their heart that if they're not making a simple thing that everyone's gonna use, they can't blitzscale it.  So I think this is the core fear. I'm fearing being a consultant. And it's tricky, because this isn't wrong. Yeah, there's a kernel. There is a good idea in there. There is an insight. There is an insight. But I might argue it's exactly wrong when you're early. Maybe we should talk about that. What's the difference between being early and maybe not even understanding the problem well, and being way later on when
<bot>: being a consultant is maybe more of a risk. I think if you're not a deep expert on what the customer's problems are and how they make money and how they work. Most founders. You make assumptions about how their business should work, which could be mistaken. So again, when the founders of Google started Google, I would imagine they were not experts on performance marketing and how basically a lot of the early Google customers, as I recall, were mortgage refinance people, where they would buy  people searching for mortgage refinancing, the advertisers would buy those clicks and they were worth a lot of money to them. And the founders of Google did not need to be experts on that. But as they got users and they build the business model, understanding what problems the customers had was super important. Right?
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<human>: All right, let's talk about fads. There have been a lot of fads.
<bot>: Yeah, well I think it's easy, especially when you're young, to just get caught up in stuff, whatever the thing is. And some of the things were pretty cool. Again, I was really into the internet. Yep, yep, yep. When that was a new thing. I was really, really, really into it. And obviously that stuck around. Certainly there's a lot of young people that got super into crypto. There's young people that got really into stock trading recently with Wall Street Bets and Reddit. You'll see people get really into stuff.
<human>: Yeah.
<bot>: It's actually great fun. In the Zuckerberg case, building Winamp plugins, that was part of the Napster thing, so they were really into that. But where could it go too far, Michael?
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<human>: And that inventory, I like to call that the worst case analysis. Like, I actually like to like, okay, this bad thing happens. What are the five things we're most afraid of now?  And when we say them out loud, do they just sound less scary? Because they didn't happen? It's like, oh, all of our customers are going to leave. Have they left? Has anyone even emailed you saying they want to leave? No. Learn how to get better at this, because this is the game. Learn how to take a punch. Learn how to get good at doing hard things.  That's the message, yeah. And it's weird because it's a superpower, right? Like in some weird way, the coolest thing about a startup is that like, if you, even if the company fails, you can get this superpower.
<bot>: I mean, it's great. Like you, this is a great person to have in your family. This is a great person to have in your friend. Like someone that's a rock. Someone that will listen, like, oh, something's bad. Let me listen. Like, let me assess the situation. Tell me what's going on. Okay. So this, okay.  All right, like, I could see why this is a setback, but, you know, seems like everything else is going okay. So, like, that's a valuable person to have around.
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<human>: When we deal with in the context of YC founders, the best people who don't get in  realize this isn't a one-shot game. Yeah, they apply again, they make progress to their company. We send the reject email to every company and the best people will be like, you're making good points, we're gonna improve on those things and we'll apply again. And I think that they realize that that's a plus what, you've earned some respect in that moment.  Like, put another way, there's an opportunity to get an advantage even when you feel like you just failed. Whereas almost the worst founders feel like, oh, now the game is off.  If I curse, it won't be counted, because the time is over. Nothing's counted after the clock runs to zero. And it's like, the game's not off. What are you talking about?
<bot>: And we see this all the time with series A's, where, man, I talk about this so much. No one puts out a press release when they fail to raise an A. So what's going on is most A's fail.  but no one ever tells anyone, but everyone tells everybody when it succeeds. And so it creates this warped reality that everyone thinks everyone is raising A's and everyone has an easy time. Everyone but me is raising a series A. Everyone but me is having an easy time. What's wrong with me? And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like, I think it's just the virtue by which this information is shared. And so people have this warped view of reality  that causes everyone to think that they are personally, you know, everything bad has happened to them and to no one else.
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<human>: So if you're getting, if you're technical and you feel like you're getting trapped here, Dalton, like how do you know it's time to get out? Like, how do you know, like, okay, like, or even if you see a friend in this situation, how do you know it's time to tell them like, hey, like, hey, think about breaking up.
<bot>: I think for the people that I talk to, which again, it's, it's probably not a representative set of the average. It's probably the people that are more disgruntled, but, um,  to the extent that you have conversations where it's like talking to someone that's like an alcoholic and it's like, I got to stop drinking. Like I can't do this anymore. Again, I'm not even trying to be funny, but it's like when someone's just like, I don't know why I'm doing this, but I'm still doing it and I can't stop. I hate my life. Like, like if that sounds like you or your friend talking about your job at Facebook, that's probably a good sign. You maybe shouldn't do it anymore. And  And the actual tactical thing you could do is keep your personal burn low so that you can do it and not get hooked on the money with all this gamification we talked about. And realize you can always come back if you're a good programmer. If you're a good programmer and you leave and you leave in a nice way, no matter what happens to you, you can come back. There's actually not that much loss you have to take. And so versus the people that are like, no, this is cool. I like my life. Yeah, stay there, right? This message is not for you. But we all know these people that want to just  like, tell you their darkest secret, which is they wake up every day and they, like, dream of quitting. Like, they have fantasies of quitting every day.
<human>: Those are people that probably should quit. And it's interesting, because we're probably talking to, like, 1% of the developers at faang companies. Like, 1%. For, like, 99% of developers at faang companies, irrelevant. This is not relevant. Yeah, this is not for you. We're not trying to argue with you, right?
<bot>: We're just saying,  Though, if you know someone that's deeply unhappy because of decisions they're making, they can just make different decisions.
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<human>: I think this brings up the next topic perfectly. So, like, all right, what happens when founders think like these and then encounter the real world?
<bot>: Yep.
<human>: So you did your analysis, you've done your validation. There's a big market opportunity. It's on trend. VC's are going to like it. I'm all lined up, but now I got to get my first customer. Uh oh. What's the VC investor toolbox for getting customer one?
<bot>: This is, it's very humbling. Again, if we were to, if we were to start a startup, we know, like, the first thing I would admit is that no matter what I know from investing in startups, that does not mean getting first customers is going to be easy for me or for Michael or for anyone. It is freaking hard. And this zero to one is always the trap. It's the bear trap that people run into that they're already focused on scaling the company and raising money, and they're kind of like glossing over or being hand wavy on how hard it is to get first customers. Like, yeah, we're gonna build our first version, we're gonna launch it, and then we're gonna be growing, and then, you know, and then they launch it and it doesn't go well. And people are just shocked.
<human>: It's funny, it's like they measured 60 times cut once. The cut didn't go well, and some people were like, oh, shit, do I measure 60 more?
<bot>: This is one of the reasons we usually advise to launch quickly, is so you get this hard medicine quickly, that your first launch is probably not gonna work and no one's gonna want your thing. Right.
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<human>: You're walking a good path. You're walking a good path.
<bot>: And if you don't, no sweat. Most folks that we fund, most folks that get into YC don't have a ton of expertise. That is totally fine. Totally fine. It just means you should admit that to yourself. Yes. And start really simple and learn on the fly. Learn within the idea space that you've chosen. Yes. And don't have a lot of prescriptive ideas on what mortgage underwriters want.
<human>: Yes.
<bot>: Just sort of walk in with, oh, this is kind of what I'm thinking, but I'm open-minded.
<human>: I need to learn a lot. And maybe it's helpful to choose an area that you're excited to learn about. Yes. Because you have a lot of learning to do. Yep. So maybe it's helpful to not choose an area that you think, well, I hate this area, but I think it's going to raise money. It's like, not the best way. I think that if you can figure out how to leverage this advice,  It's really interesting and I want to bring it back to the first point you made. It's really hard to give one size fits all advice. Like these two examples, you come with expertise, you don't.
<bot>: And it's the same idea. I'm arguing this is precisely the same startup just with different people that are the founders.
<human>: I think this is what's fun about working at YC is how often when in office hours with a founder I'm like, oh,  Actually, you should maybe do it differently than what you might hear in the video. That's the kind of cool thing about being able to work with people one-on-one. You can actually customize. Awesome. Thank you very much.
<bot>: Sounds good. Thanks.
</s>


<human>: So anyways, right, I think that we're trying, you know, I think that there's like...  I'll say this, I'm a business guy, right? I think YC has a lot of messaging that's like, yeah, our business guy's important, da-da-da-da, like you don't need them. I agree, you don't need them. But I will say this, there are a lot of very successful non-technical people on our network that do amazing work. And I think one of the things that if you want to learn from them,  we're trying to give you one of the most important patterns we see from those folks.
<bot>: Yeah, they're great recruiters and they do this thought experiment of who's the best person in the world and they find a way to get that person to work with them. That's bending the universe to your will is what that is.
<human>: So you should hold yourself to their standard and maybe you'll get their success. All right, thanks Dalton.
<bot>: Thanks.
</s>


<human>: This is Dalton plus Michael. And today we're going to talk about why AI is going to create more successful founders in the world. It's interesting, as we've gotten older. Oh, sad.  We kind of see a new set of tools come into the market and then an explosion in the number of founders who can now create value. And we've seen this before, right? Like what was the first time you saw this?
<bot>: I certainly noticed when the internet was new, people that knew how to build websites  were suddenly able to make lots of money from the skill. And it was like really basic stuff. High school kids were making tons of money. I remember people that could just figure out how to sell stuff on eBay, where you would go buy something cheap, but then list it on eBay and arbitrage. Basically, you would see people that kind of understood the new tooling that came out and would like do a hustle and make ungodly amounts of money. And it was just because they understood the new tools.
</s>


<human>: The second thing is around meetings. And we talk about this a lot. You're going to have to have some meetings.  I've seen a couple tricks, but they can all be reduced down to write shit down. The worst thing is when you have to have another meeting, because people didn't write the shit down from the first meeting. That is like when you know you punched yourself in the face. But like, I'm so shocked.
<bot>: It's like, no, I'm smart. Again, let me push you on that, because you and I agree. But let's make this clearly honest. What are we saying? What we mean is, say you and I are in a meeting and we agree on something.  If neither of us writes it down, it's like it never happened. It's like, we were like patting ourselves on the back. What a great meeting, right, Michael? No one writes it down. We're like, what are we talking about?
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<human>: Well, and this might be torturing the metaphor, but basically what we're saying is instead of moving towards what looks like the easy freshwater pond, but that's a trap, you move towards the mountains, the desert, right? The places that people don't want to go.  But when people find gold, they usually don't find it in the middle of downtown Manhattan. They usually have to go far away. And so I think that those companies are really encouraging to work with in YC. Because you think to yourself, if you continue to walk that path away from the tar pit, even if you start with a tar pit idea, great. And honestly, we fund folks with tar pit ideas because we have a thought that maybe they'll  pivot out, and many of them do, which is kind of cool to watch.
<bot>: Do your research, know what the bar is, think about the supply and demand thing, and give yourself the best odds for success. This is how you create luck. And so one of the reasons we want to put this out there is we would love to see more founders kind of recognize this dynamic we're describing and make some moves on the supply and demand side, because I think that'll meaningfully increase your odds of success. So just think on that.
<human>: And take it from us, because we can't tell you what the play to win is, but we think it's our responsibility to tell you the plays that we see losing all the time. And if you can avoid the most common patterns of death, you can perhaps chart a unique path to success. And if any advisor tells you they can do more for you than that, be wary. All right, Dalton, great chat.
<bot>: Thanks.
</s>


<human>: In this way, there's a bit of advantage to being young, right?
<bot>: Yeah. Like, you and I experienced this ourselves as founders where we were young when we first started. And this is the beauty of not knowing anything. The beauty of not knowing anything is that you think everything is easy. And none of the innumerable reasons why something might be hard or your startup might fail even occurs to you. You're like, oh, yeah, I'm 22. Like, everything's easy. I can figure this out, right?
<human>: Yeah.
<bot>: And so, again, this is like the midwit meme, right? Where if you don't know anything, your approach looks a lot like the approach of people that are really good founders. And the worst place to be is that you know just enough to know why the things you're trying are hard. And the odds are stacked against you, and that freaks you out. And so you think about it a lot, right?
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<human>: So let's start with some stats.  Right? So, A16Z, Andrew Zinowitz, pretty famous, impressive investor. So, they've done 234 investments into YC companies. Sequoia, another impressive investor, 139 investments into YC companies. Founders Fund, a very controversial, counterintuitive investor, has done 104 investments in YC companies. And I could keep going.
<bot>: Yeah, and so if you look at the YC top companies list, anyone can look at this, this is on the internet, and you actually look at who invested in them. It's all the big investors. It's all the big investors. And so by definition, these investors are voting with their pocketbook to invest lots of money across the board into the YC portfolio because they like money and they're smart.
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<human>: Okay, next. This is a classic one, especially because you have to deal with so many admissions questions. Applying to YC Dalton. What is. What is the. What is the Jedi founder move to apply to YC versus the midwit founder?
<bot>: Yeah, the. The extremes of this and the midwit meme are. I filled out my application and submitted it. Like. Like, I applied, and the midwit founder is like, gee, I don't know if now is the right time to apply. I don't know if we're ready. Oh, I'm gonna. I'm gonna write a draft of my application and send it to 15 people, and I'm gonna get feedback on my application, and I'm going to, like, you know, oh, I need an introduction to alumni, and I need to talk to alumni, and I need.
<human>: I need recommendations. Yeah. Recommendations from strangers that don't know me.
<bot>: I'm gonna do a lot of research. Like, you see, you talk to people that, like, put months of effort into their application to YC strategy.
<human>: Yes.
<bot>: Not correlated with success. And then you talk to people, and they're like, oh, yeah. I just, like, filled it out in 30 minutes and submitted.
<human>: Yeah. And I spent all that other time working on my company.
<bot>: Let me be clear. We're not saying do a bad job on your application. We're just saying trying to tweak out on this is, like, something that you can spend tons and tons and tons of time on. I'm not sure that's a great allocation of resources.
</s>


<human>: Yes.
<bot>: And if someone is literally offering to invest, you should take them a lot more seriously. If someone says, I want to invest this amount of money, and you should not even apply to YC and take the money and all that, maybe you want to. That's not crazy.
<human>: It's not the worst offer.
<bot>: Yeah, that is reasonable. But the weirdest formative advice is someone that is aggressively not investing and coming up with excuses about why you're not ready, or you need to talk to some other people or come back in six months and they're actually giving you advice to not raise money from another investor, including such as YC, because reasons.
<human>: So, no, I think to wrap this up, I think that I love about what you said is that if you were to look at the best YC companies, all the best VC firms, and all of the best seed funds have invested in them. Yep. And so maybe you should spend a little bit more time looking at what people do rather than what they say or they meme or they tweet.
<bot>: Yep.
<human>: All right. Great chatting.
<bot>: Thanks.
</s>


<human>: I think notebooks are great for ideas. I think, like, a well-managed to-do list is a software product that you need to adopt. And there's, like, 80 of them. I actually don't even care which one you adopt. But it's like, when I, like, tell something to founders, and then they write it down in a notebook, I'm like, that's gone forever.
<bot>: But they look cool. They have, like, a fountain pen, and they're, like, taking beautiful notes, Michael.
<human>: We all know that everything important's in the Moleskine notebook.  This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. Today we're going to talk about how future billionaires get shit done. So Dalton, you were inspired by a PG boast when thinking of this idea, right?
<bot>: Yeah, Paul Graham wrote this really famous blog post, I believe called Maker Schedule, Manager Schedule, where he said something that all of us have thought before, but he put it very succinctly and in great words. And so if you haven't read it before, anyone out there on the internet, you should read it. Just Google Maker Schedule, Manager Schedule, we can put a link in. And he introduces the idea of the difference between how makers, i.e. programmers in his case, organize their time to be productive,  versus folks that are managers, all right? And so it's great terminology. It's good stuff.
</s>


<human>: What else falls in this category?
<bot>: Too much optimism around thinking that because you raise some amount of money, whatever that is, is going to save you from things not working or that your investors are magical and will save you. Like somehow they have magical powers. And so because I, you know, because we raised from XYZ,  And again, in this market, this is more, maybe people will believe us more. No one believed this a year ago. No one did. But just because you raise a bunch of money from important, famous people does not mean all problems no longer exist. And so you see people being too optimistic where they just turned off their brain once they raised money that they would ever, they were just like, Hey, I'm on easy street, man. Like we got it. We nailed it. Like we did it.
</s>


<human>: I think that more business people need to embrace the idea that great software companies are built by great software engineers. A common retort out here is like, Dalton, we're not building a software business. Software is in there, but it's not that important. It's a tech-enabled. Yeah. We're just building a simple marketplace, right? Like, we can just use da-da-da-da marketplace software. It's just a copy of DoorDash with a little twist. Why do we need a great software engineer? What's your response?
<bot>: you know, it's hard to win that debate in theory. Like it's hard to convince someone just in the debate. They'll be like, well, we're just going to agree to disagree. But I think if you just look at the facts of the companies we funded, like literally DoorDash or literally Airbnb or any of these folks, they lived and died by their speed of shipping software.  And if what they did was buy white label software or have some dev shop in a foreign country making edits to the website, there's a 0% chance those companies would have worked. And so again, who am I to say there won't be some future company that maybe uses one of these things? But the more that we're exposed to seeing what these companies look like at the earliest stages, even if they don't look like strictly tech businesses,  man, there's no way these things would have gotten off the ground without having a really great person who cared as much as a co-founder cares. Building this thing day in and day out versus someone ripping you off, charging you $500 an hour to change some words on the website.
<human>: And you don't even know. You're not even like ball game. Like it's not even. Well, what pisses me off is that like, I think in other areas,  that are equally as hard as being a successful tech founder, let's say athletics, I think more people are realistic about it, strangely. Like, the equivalent is, you know, a five-foot-four person who doesn't jump, run. I can't shoot, I can't run, but I got a lot of heart mangles. Yeah, there are not that many of those people who are saying to the world, I want to be in the NBA, right? Whereas we see the equivalent of that  in startups all the time. And it's one thing if you're 6'6 and you're a great high school basketball player, you probably won't make the NBA, but all right, at least you're in the stadium. You're amongst the million people who could. And I think that people are not honest with themselves. And I think what we're trying to do is give you this secret, which is that you can almost get a ticket to being in the game, and it requires recruiting one person.  How cool is that? This shouldn't be seen as a negative, it should be seen as an extreme positive. It's like a golden, what is it, Willy Wonka ticket.
<bot>: And even if you are technical yourself, or sometimes people are medium technical, so I was a technical CEO, but I still tremendously benefited by having an additional technical co-founder. And so this is also a thing where you're not like, okay, well, I can kind of, that doesn't count.  There's actually tremendous benefits from having someone, again, who cares as much as a founder, who's committed as much as a founder, and who's at the top of the game, like a 10X engineer on a founder level, you're unstoppable.
<human>: And what's weird is sometimes we had competitors in my startups whose teams were constructed this way, horrible tech talent.  It was funny in hindsight because we never had to be worried. They could raise more money. They could have nicer office. They could have more employees. They could have cooler people using their apartment. It did it.  matter. Like having better engineering is the gift that gives you more shots every day.
<bot>: Even if you need to pivot, no matter what happens, good or bad, you're in a better position to react to these changes.
<human>: And I think the even scarier thing about this is that when you start with a team of business people assessing engineers, and they are naturally going to start by hiring worse engineers,  all of your future engineers are hired by those people. It's compound negative effects. Yes. Exactly. It compounds. It's so bad.
<bot>: It's so bad.
</s>


<human>: I often find myself saying in this situation, make something that would impress you. Make something that you would be proud of.  And then you can sell that to other people like you. And so I think that's kind of a really cool superpower when you can be like, oh, yeah, I can tell whether this is good because it's solving a problem I have or a problem I've solved before. Yeah, I can tell whether this is good.
<bot>: If you wanted to build a new compiler, if you wanted to build something that's really arcane but that you know a lot about and you have a lot of taste, you get a lot of opinions about, a lot of expertise on, often you should listen to that expertise.
</s>


<human>: So why do founders do this? What's going on in a founder's head that gets them to think, this is how I should assess an opportunity, this is how I should figure out whether I work on this idea or not, is using these tools what's changed? Why is this far more common now?
<bot>: Well, something I noticed when we were founders is there wasn't access into the mind of investors very much.
<human>: No. A lot of their appeal was how elusive they were behind closed doors. You had to be special to even get access to them.
<bot>: And so a funny thing that has happened is there's now so much content marketing from investors. Again, not necessarily bad. And again, we are acknowledging this is a form of marketing course, of course. But you now hear a lot more about market analysis and market opportunities. In addition, there's all of these things for college students and post college of programs
<human>: startup classes
<bot>: Startup classes. And they tend to be taught by non founders, they tend to be taught by investors. And a lot of what you learn is about how to pitch, how to do market analysis, how to identify ideas via market trends
<human>: What's a good idea?
<bot>: Right. And so if you go to classes at your university or, you know, wherever you're encountering this stuff, if the folks, you should ask yourself if the folks teaching this have not had much actual startup experience where they were the founder who had to do the zero to one. Yeah, you might, you know, most likely this is coming, this is a VC mentality. Bit of advice, right.
</s>


<human>: Right? And I think that story isn't told, right? I think the story is always this kind of depressing story of like, oh, maybe you won't need it. You won't be needed anymore as opposed to here's a set of tools you could do things that people couldn't think of doing affordably before. Like you could be your own boss. You don't even need to be inside of a company to create value.
<bot>: Yeah.
<human>: So anyways, hopefully that's inspiring. Good chat.
<bot>: Thanks.
</s>


<human>: So I think there's two challenges here. I think the first challenge is people often don't understand how high the bar is.  the consumer products that they use, they don't realize how actually good they are and how many others existed and failed. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing, and we should get into this a little bit more, is that I think that timing tends to be very important in consumer. So I think sometimes people don't realize when timing is helping them in a consumer business and when timing is actually harming them and existing incumbents can be  have an almost unfair advantage.
<bot>: Yeah, I think from our perspective, or from my perspective reading applications, let's start with this calibration of what good looks like. Because again, imagine the person applying with an idea for a consumer social network, it's unlaunched.  They found, you know, they believe what they're doing is like brand new and they don't really know what the bar is.
</s>


<human>: So here's the first one we hear a lot. Before I start a company, I want to get experience working on the hardest technical problems at the largest scale. And Faang is the only place in the world to do this.  What do you think, Dalton?
<bot>: That is, that's just quoting the recruiter. You're like, you're like reading the, you're reading what the recruiter's line is. I mean, look, most people that get most jobs at Faangs, when you talk to them after they have the job, if they're, you know, get a couple of beers in them,  They're working on some bullshit ad server. They're working on one pixel on one corner of one thing. They're working on some project that's going to get killed. Again, if you're someone that's a good enough programmer to get hired to work on some deep technical infrastructure at Google, then this line is true. But most folks that I talk to, at least,  kind of have what is like a shitty job, but that's been presented and branded to them is a very cool thing. And again, this is marketing, like they want you to take the job, they want you to keep the job, and someone's got to do all the crappy ad server work, right? Someone's got to. And so if you actually look at the numbers, way more folks that you meet  that work at a faang job have the equivalent of some shitty ad server buttons or translating it to foreign languages or something, just like the worst job. Then the people that are working on the core search infrastructure at Google, which again, that actually sounds really cool. And that is working on hard technical problems at the largest scale. So I think you just want to be honest about what the job actually is and not just
<human>: Quote the recruiter. And let's be clear, the way that you actually learn what the job is, is you talk to someone doing it, you don't talk to the recruiter.  I think maybe people don't quite understand how the entire job of the recruiter and the number one way they get paid, promoted, everything is convincing you to sign up. Yeah, they get comped per person.
<bot>: It's like a car salesman. They don't make money if they don't sell a car. If you don't sign on the dotted line, they're not getting paid.
</s>


<human>: Well, the movie analogy is so perfect because when you think about the launches that most people experience, I think one of the most famous types of launch that you would see in the world is a movie launch, right? It's a movie premiere. That gives you the exact opposite of impression of how a startup is, right? It's like whole bunch of press, whole bunch of hoopla, a whole bunch of people watching that movie quickly and then it fading to nothing over the course of like a month or two.  Whereas a startup is the exact opposite of that. It's like a whole bunch of nobody gives a shit for a really long time. And then some point 10 years from now, everyone really cares.  but I don't know that people experience those.
<bot>: Can you imagine actual time lapse of the Facebook story? Like if there was a camera mounted on Mark Zuckerberg's head for like the first 10 years, what that would actually be versus what people think it was from watching the freaking movie. Like, again, like it was a lot of someone sitting at a keyboard writing code  and like staring at graphs a lot. And it wasn't that interesting. Like it was not entertaining.
<human>: Not entertaining. Well, and especially in the early days where it was exciting to move to another school, like getting another population of 5000 users was like,  Excite was a big moment inside of the company.
<bot>: Yeah. Well, and again, if the actual movie would be them sitting at their desk in the house, being like typing some stuff into a terminal, being like, okay, we just launched a new school and they're like, yeah, you know what I'm saying? Like there's no music, there's no backing track. They're just kind of sitting there staring at a screen and being like, okay,
<human>: Oh, wait, something just broke. Fuck.
<bot>: Oh, hold on. Sight's down. OK. Sight's down.
<human>: All right.
<bot>: All right. Well, it looks good. Sight's back up. All right, cool. I'll be back. And so I think movies hurt us here. I guess they're good because they inspire us. But I think movies mess people up a lot of what they think normal is.
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<human>: So let's start with some of the assumptions that we hear from these potential slash future founders about why working at Faang right out of college or soon thereafter makes sense, why it's,  And it's never presented us to us as like, it's a pretty good opportunity. It's always presented to me at least as like, oh, of course it's essential. It's an essential part of this.
<bot>: Yeah, they state a fact. They're stating facts.
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