So, we're here in Mountain View today with PG himself at the original offices doing your talk that you do for the YC batch. I looked it up. This is actually the 47th YC batch.
You know, I've been trying to calculate that number and I wasn't sure exactly what it was.
No wonder I'm not too worried about this talk.
I've done it that many times. It changes a little bit.
Yes, it's the 21st year also of YC.
You know, the weird thing is I make the talk from scratch every time.
Really? I probably say the same things over and over,
but I always feel like I should, like I think, "Oh my god," a couple hours beforehand, "Oops, I'm going talking to YC. I better think in advance a little bit about what to say." And so I open up a text file and start typing things. And that's how it always is.
Any tidbits from today that are new from winter?
No, most of starting a startup—here, this is an actually interesting point. Most of starting a startup is the same. Most of starting a startup is always the same, right? In microprocessors, or AI, or like in the internal combustion engine, it's always the same stuff.
Good. Well, in that case, let's run through some questions.
So you recently posted that the startups YC funds now are much more serious than they were in the supposedly good old days. What did you mean by that?
Well, what I meant by supposedly good old days is people are always saying that YC has jumped the shark. I remember when people started saying this, which is in about like 2008, right? YC is always this thing that was great, but now it's not what it was, right? Because they can't say it was always terrible. They have to admit it was once great. So, if they want to attack it, they have to say it's fallen, right? It was good, but now it's not. It's always not good anymore. And so that's what I meant by the supposedly good old days, because the old days are what people claim used to be good. But in the old days there was a lot of things like Reddit, right? Which, valuable as it is, is not exactly intercontinental ballistic cargo, right? Which I did office hours with recently. How about that for an idea?
Like it's like an ICBM except instead of exploding, it lands.
And drops stuff off. That's serious, right? You don't get much more serious than an intercontinental ballistic cargo.
Yeah. What were some of the other serious ones?
Yes. There's a startup in this batch. There's all sorts of different approaches to curing cancer and I say fund many of them because any one working would be good. One way to approach curing cancer is vaccines. That's one end, right? The opposite end is therapies, right? And so there's a startup in this batch that is basically doing on-demand research for people with cancer. And what I like about it is they're sort of inflicting on cancer the death of a thousand cuts, which may be the way to defeat it because it's notoriously not the sort of thing where you just come up with a cure for cancer. I mean, maybe you do if these vaccines work. Maybe you do, right? But maybe the way you fight it is the death of a thousand cuts.
And they're actually really interesting because they helped another YC...
Yeah, right. It's part of the whole YC community. They helped Sid from GitLab deal with his cancer, which he has done very successfully. He approached it like a startup, right? And these were essentially his co-founders in that de facto startup. And it's funny because I remember thinking after that, I always had this process going of what would be a good startup idea, right? And I remember after that saying, "Somebody should start a startup to do for everyone what Sid did for himself." And now, not only is this startup happening, it's the people who actually did it for Sid.
So, it couldn't be better. I was so delighted when I realized that one was happening.
Yeah. And I think his essay that "I went founder mode on my cancer," that's a very good way of describing what he did.
Yeah, using another YC term to attack his cancer. So along that vein, I was rereading the essay you wrote in 2012 where you coined the term frighteningly ambitious.
Frighteningly ambitious ideas. A lot of those ideas have actually gotten done since then.
Well, a new Google. That was one of them, right? And it turns out, look, I sort of predicted this, that the way you make a new Google is not by attacking them head-on. You have to wait for things to change so much that their model is obsolete and that's when you can do it. And that's what OpenAI is, right? Like I realized very early on, after using OpenAI, like whoa, I don't use Google anymore. I don't use searches that what I really wanted from searches was not web pages. I wanted information. Why not just ask the AI for the information, right? And I'm sure everyone's now had this experience.
And it was incubated at YC.
One of Sam's many side projects.
And so along the same veins around ambitious as a term, I am curious when you figured out why a founder needs to be not just unusually talented in technical ability or something else, but they actually have to be really ambitious as well.
When did I figure out that founders had to be really ambitious? I think I already knew that before we started YC, because when we started YC we already had all this experience of doing a startup ourselves, right? And so we knew that it was grueling and you need something to drive you through all those obstacles, and honestly, being dutiful is not enough. The obstacles are too fearsome for mere dutifulness to do it. So there's got to be something driving you, and you call it ambition.
And part of ambition, I assume, is wanting to be a billionaire someday.
You'd be surprised actually.
You know what actually motivates founders day-to-day? The fear of failure. Even though they're doing this thing that if they succeed, they'll be super rich, that does motivate them. But the thing that motivates them at any given moment is the fear of disaster, looking like a fool, the server crashing, right? Like if you're running some online service and your server's crashing, you're not thinking, "I got to deal with this because if I deal with it, I'll become a billionaire." You're thinking, "Oh no, the server is crashing. It will be a disaster. The engine of my model train set is falling off the edge of the table. I need to go and save it," right? That's what you're thinking at any given time. You just don't want your model train set to break. You put your head down and work on the model train set for 10 years, and then you lift your head up and like, "Holy... if I add up the value of all my shares at the last round valuation, I'm a billionaire." But it takes people by surprise when it happens.
Sometimes I'm the first to tell them. I do the math. I'm like, "Wait, according to your last round, you're a billionaire." And they're like, "Oh, yeah, I am."
That's the way we want it. And I'm curious, can you tell me a story about a founder where when they started YC, they were maybe not ambitious enough and then they became very ambitious during the batch?
Those stories are rare because most of this quality is inborn. Sam Altman famously was extremely formidable the first time I met him before we even accepted him, and that's more the rule than the exception. So the one case where you see founders—it's not that they lack ambition. It's more like they've been trained not to show it. Because when you're young you're often in situations where you're supposed to be obedient. You're not supposed to go off and do what you want. You're supposed to do what people tell you. Maybe you have pushy parents who tell you to do what they want, right? And so you've never let yourself go. That's the one case. But even then, I would argue that the person was ambitious. They've just been trained not to show it.
Yeah. Actually, that's a good point because I think nowadays a lot of people think about startups like another badge that they should collect along the resume.
Only if it fails. If it works, it's like your life's work. You don't have any more badges, right? And so what kind of badge is a failed startup? Not much of a badge. I think if people think that, they're not thinking it through, right? Honestly, it was quite early on in YC's history when people started applying to YC for the prestige, right? Like they would apply to Harvard hoping they would get in. But the thing is, if you apply to Harvard and get in, you should do it because no matter how stupid you are, there's easy majors you can choose and sort of slide through. You'll get a Harvard degree and everybody will be impressed with you. With startups, there's no easy major, right? It's like applying to Harvard and being forced to study theoretical physics, right? It's really rough if you're not very hardworking and clever and determined. And so these people trying to do YC as a credential, they had no idea what they were asking for. They didn't realize like this is a really, really unsuitable credential.
There are many easier ways to get credentials.
Yeah. If you want to seem cool, starting a startup is just about the least efficient way to do it.
Yeah, it's brutally hard.
