I think like AI and like a big change like this favors younger people, and for all sorts of reasons. So again, for what it's worth, I'm a late bloomer. I did YC when I was 27 and...
Yeah. So hey, late bloomers, heck the old guys.
All right, guys. I'm really excited to be here with you. Thanks for all doing this with me. So I guess just to start, when did you all first go through YC as founders?
I think I did it first. I was summer 2006, so the third batch ever.
I did winter 2007, so six months later, and then summer '08.
Okay. So, a long time. It's like pretty close to the beginning.
So, I guess where I want to start is like you all have in many incarnations seen, you know, what YC has been like as founders, as partners, you know, you've sort of worked outside of YC, inside of it. What has changed? And so I guess maybe the lens I want to ask this question through is what was the value proposition to founders in 2006 versus 2016, 2026? Like what has changed? What has stayed the same?
Yeah. What was it like in '06? The most surprising thing to people from the outside I found is actually how little has changed, and I think that's kind of by design, which is like the thing that Paul Graham created that we all did in the early 2000s. Like it was great. It was a great product. And as you know, when you have a great product, you like don't [__] with it. You know there are some things that change, but I would say in broad strokes it's much more the same than it is different.
How would you capture the essence of that product like to a founder if you had to boil it down to like two or three things? Like what is that product about?
So we recently worked on a redesign of the Y Combinator website. Actually Gary had it. We actually like tried to write it down possibly for the first time. Do you want to explain this? It's really your words on the website.
Oh gosh. I mean it was a team effort, but like honestly we tried to return to, you know, what is the founder's experience. And then we found all of these old photos of, you know, actually your brother is like the first one on there and it's like double pop collar...
We'll pop that up on the screen.
And then you start flipping through and it's, you know, Patrick and John Collison. It's Brian and Joe and Nate at Airbnb and you see them so young, and then you see them, you know, ringing the bell. And it's like basically what we're trying to create is like Disneyland for transformation from, you know, startup founders who are just starting out to literally the people who sort of make these the companies that really matter. It's actually a social process, like all reality is sort of socially constructed. And then uniquely like I remember when I found YC and then came to my first Startup School. It was kind of like being a fish out of water and then jumping into water. Like I was surrounded by people who were builders, who like were earnest and, you know, basically when you get into YC, like we take people who are earnest and technical and then at the end of that process hopefully they become formidable. And so when you go to the homepage, that's what that's about. It's like YC is like a transformative process. Yeah.
It's like Hogwarts or something. It's like this. It's not that naggy. It's actually very chill. It's more like, um, you know, I don't know how you would describe it.
I'm a Harry Potter fan, so I prefer to think of it like Hogwarts.
I mean I kind of felt like when I did it in Winter '16, and I felt like starting a company is such a weird odd experience. And in some ways having this group that normalizes what it's about, where you're like surrounded by other people where they like talk about like here's the new language and the new set of things you should be thinking about. It almost like makes the strange dream that you're in like you get calibrated or something like that.
So, I thought that was a big part. And then I guess also there's always been the thing of like there is some stamp of approval. I think that's like hard to, you know, sort of underweight. I'm curious how you guys think about that with like outsiders in particular. One of the things that seems different to me at least is now more than 10 years ago, and I'm sure more than 20 years ago, like the ecosystem is like an understood thing and like a lot of founders like, you know, they can read a lot of stuff online. People can read a lot about them online. There's more known in general, but I still feel like there's this thing that YC can do, which is take people who maybe aren't yet in that vortex and identify talent somehow and bring them into the vortex. I'd just be curious if you guys like spend like active cycles thinking about that.
All the time. I mean actually I'm in the middle of my very intense addiction to Claude Code and Codex, and like actually using this stuff is pretty wild because like I basically recreated my 2008 startup. It's like 70,000 lines of code. I did it in about like I don't know 90 hours over two weeks because I have a full-time job and like also like trying to raise kids. It just like really compressed a lot of my sleep. But at the end of it, I have a code base that is better than what it took like five engineers and me taking anti-narcoleptics to like build for my YC startup.
It's like unbelievable, right? It's like actually something happened November, end of November when Opus 4.5 came out that, you know, I heard about it. I was like, 'Hey, what's going on?' Like the most interesting thing for us is like we'd been talking about it for years and we'd been using it for years and then it wasn't until really even December where AGI's here guys for code. Like I feel like I could create like in 80 hours something that I could not create with $5 million and five engineers in two years.
So to stick with that like this coding topic, I guess my two questions flowing from that are: one, what are you trying to identify as greatness? If before this moment you were like we need to find great engineers, like what is the thing you're looking for now? How has that changed? And my second question is like these startups, you know, like the advice has been, you know, write code, talk to users. Like what is that now? Is that different?
It's prompt and talk to users. Like it's a lot less... I'm prompting, I guess.
So we just like literally this happened and then all of us have been sort of collectively like Harj did a project, like Jared's coding all the time, our team is all using this stuff, and then we realized, hey, why don't we actually put it in the application process? So for the first time for the spring batch, you can upload a transcript of your Codex or Claude Code transcript making a feature, and we're like starting to figure out how to process it. And we put it in a security sandbox because we figure it'll be prompt injected very quickly. You can tell a lot about whether someone can build just from like how they prompt the agents. And it's like do they know systems? You know, for YC you get a t-shirt that says 'Make Something People Want' on day one. It's like, you know, if you look at a resume, like you can sort of guess at whether they can make something, and then you really can't tell whether they can make something people want. You can look at their GitHub and you can maybe see if they can make something. Like the only way you can really tell if they can make something people want is like they did it already, right? And there's not exactly like a GitHub for prompting. I guess that's what you're asking people for.
But you know, you can tell how, you know, do they use plan mode? Like do they think about systems? Like, you know, are they prematurely optimizing? Are they overengineering? Like, you know, are they... Yeah, basically like what is a feature to them? What is a complete release? Do they think about like the edge cases? Yeah. How you do anything is how you do everything. My favorite Steve Jobs quote. I mean he talks about like, you know, if you're a carpenter, you can tell other really great carpenters, and we don't look at the front, like everyone looks at the front and I'm like, oh yeah, this seems good. You know what a great carpenter does is, you know, an artisan looks at the back of the cabinet because like the back of the cabinet, only other carpenters are going to look at. And so I feel like that was one of my favorite things like when I funded companies at Initialized, when I, you know, was a partner at YC the first time around, like that was my number one thing that I loved, which is like is their game recognized game? Like, you know, would this person, would I go work for this person if I weren't doing the thing that I was doing now.
This is how you spotted Fidji with Instacart, right?
Yeah. He came in and honestly like it was craft again. He literally had built, you know, an iPhone app that was a demo app. Claude Code didn't exist, so he actually had to build it himself. And then the way I could tell is, turning the cabinet to the back, it was he could scroll it and it scrolled really smoothly. And that wasn't true for like that era of iPhone apps, like the App Store and the iOS app was brand new. Yeah.
And then I feel like you guys do this all the time.
I think so. I mean to your question of like how does it change the way we might think about picking founders, I think it's going to just expand the net versus necessarily change it. I think we're all still in agreement that we absolutely want to fund like genius engineers who aren't necessarily using Claude Code. There's always like there's going to be like a Patrick Collison of every era and you want to like fund those people. The way we've talked about it internally is that this is probably an era where we might find more Parker Conrads. Like Parker when he applied with Zenefits, at least like 2013, like I remember the application extremely well written but like single founder, kind of not in central casting, like kind of like not quite technical, like technical enough that I think he had like a demo but like didn't have a CS degree, wasn't like sort of like the traditional YC archetype. As soon as, I think actually the only reason we interviewed him is at that point his previous company SigFig, I had used it. It's like a personal finance app, like he's clearly capable of doing stuff. In the interview it was clear immediately that he like deeply understood what he was talking about. He was super articulate, clearly like a really strong product thinker. It worked out for him because he recruited a co-founder during the batch and then obviously Zenefits had its thing but then Rippling is obviously huge. But I suspect that there's probably just like if Parker hadn't got his co-founder during the batch, it would have been a totally different story. And I suspect now like Parker of today is just in Claude Code like actually building quite sophisticated applications.
I guess it's also interesting because like Parker is one of the most probably like commercially intelligent people there is, and I guess, you know, coding applications are probably making people with that shape increase, you know, increase their advantage. Obviously I'm sure like the, you know, the real technical breakthroughs are always going to be really important.
And this is like markedly better than just looking at a resume or really I mean, you know, I, you know, when I first came back to YC like I read all the feedback, like I, you know, we're on r/ycombinator too with our anons and we know like, you know, what people are saying. It's like yeah, like we should pay attention to this and frankly like we need to do better than that, right? Like just because someone, you know, Parker did go to Harvard, but like actually we shouldn't fund someone because they went to Harvard. We should fund someone because they actually understand the user and are super unbelievably tenacious. That's actually universal for any product, any vertical, any like set of customers you have. Like the most important thing is, you know, agency and taste. Like agency is I see this person and they have this problem and I believe I can solve it using technology. And then taste is like, oh well let me actually build the first version and then get it in the hands of people. Yeah. And did it work? And like, oh how did it break? Like you go all the way into the weeds and it's like this incredible amount of like imagine like this, you know, hundreds of thousands of lines of code and then you're going through and fixing like all the bugs. Like think about the tireless, ceaseless gardener that is like necessary to like... Have you ever been to like the Bahá'í gardens in Haifa? It's the most beautiful gardens I've ever been. There's not a single weed, there's not a leaf out of place. It's like I think about like the best products in the world, the best experiences in the world are like that set of gardens and it's because people like it's actually a religion and like they really, really care.
Actually, I'm interested on that topic. I feel like a piece of advice I found myself change a little bit over the years is I think it used to feel a little bit more like you could just like ship something broken fast and then iterate from there. And I still think that's like a good general mindset, but I do feel like the bar for products is just so high now. Like, you know, like the quality of a software product at Series A seems really high to me lately. I don't know. How do you guys like advise people as they're like getting like MVPs out?
Well, if Gary was able to ship 70,000 lines of code in a week while also running YC at the same time, I feel like the bar for what, you know, two founders working on their idea full-time could do before they interview with YC like should be a lot higher.
And we see this in the batches. Like a few weeks into the batch, we do or some of the groups do what we call, we call it product showcase now. You just like get up there and like demo, quick demo of what you've built so far. And it's just like every six months over the last three years, it's like the bar for what you should demo even a few weeks into the batch just keeps going up and up.
It also makes me wonder like inside of batch a company ought to be able to pivot more times than they used to be able to. Like a company ought to be able to try stuff, see if they get traction in a few weeks, and if they don't like it, move. Like are you seeing that happen? I mean I know a lot of this is new but do you feel like that's going to be happening? Is it happening?
Absolutely. I think we're seeing companies try many things during the batch.
Do you advise in that direction? I felt like historically there was the YC school of thought I interpreted a little bit more as like ship fast, iterate, you know, see where you're at, go from there. And I've interpreted versus in contrast the Keith Rabois school of thought was like you're a movie producer, like dream your movie and then like ensure it happens and like don't let anybody say no.
I feel like the YC job is so much more in sort of almost like the psychology therapist end of the spectrum on this stuff. And I think when it relates to ideas, at least for me, a lot of it is more going off the vibe of the founder. Like I don't really have a blanket like should you pivot quickly and give up on this idea or stick with it for a long time. It's just like usually when you're meeting with founders, you can just tell like if someone's like been working on something like they've never seemed excited about it and like two weeks in they're still not very excited about it. It's like hard to tell them, oh, you just need to like persevere and keep going. It's usually better for them to like find the thing they have the spark about. What do you think?
Yeah, I agree. I think like an anti-pattern for founders who are pivoting is like they have no existing prior on what a good idea is and they're hoping that the outside world will tell them what a good idea is. And so they launch like five totally different things for five totally different groups of users hoping that like one of them takes off. Yeah, they usually don't. Typically what I'll try to do is I'll try to like dig deeper with them to try to find an idea that they actually care about and then see how we can like turn that into a startup idea. One of the things that I've like noticed, which a lot of people have noticed, this isn't some big insight, is that the sort of median startup in YC batches is a good indicator of like trends that are upcoming. Like I noticed a couple years ago before AI was what, like there was like one batch where like all of a sudden like half the companies were AI companies and the next batch it was like 75% and then it was like it all looks like AI companies basically except for, you know, hard tech. You got hard tech too.
10% hard tech. YC is the hard tech of hard tech, but there's a lot of... So what is the trend right now that you are seeing a lot of that you think YC might be particularly, you know, attuned to early?
I don't think there's any strong trends yet. It's all just AI right now.
It's all just AI right now. I'd say some things that are smaller trends that might be glimmers of the future, just in the current batch, prediction markets is big. I think like Kalshi is like very inspirational to a generation of people. Stablecoins and crypto stuff might be another interesting like non-AI trend to talk about.
Do you have a sense for why Kalshi and like why are these companies, because I agree they've captured something. Like what is that do you think? Like I feel like there is a generation that has been very motivated and interested in it and it's clearly taking off. Do you have a feel for what that thing is?
I mean, anytime there's a regulatory change, you know, these things were like in a gray area and then now it's green light. So, dude, everyone's going to do it. Like there's, you know, capital flows to it. You know, capital is required for building consumer businesses and boom, you got a consumer business growing super fast. Like, you get more capital, the flywheel happens and you got another DoorDash, which is great. I mean, capital, you know, capital as a cudgel works there. Yeah. Really, really well.
Yeah. It's interesting. So, but what's funny is like it's not clear to me capital as a cudgel works as well with AI companies anymore.
Like you kind of don't need to have like the thousand-person company anymore.
It's interesting. I still feel like I'm waiting for that where like I know there are obviously some companies like backed by YC that are like, I'd love to like, you know, I invested and I'd love to invest more, but they're super profitable. I'm like, okay, that's great. I'm very happy for you. Yeah. But there's also companies raising bigger rounds than ever and consuming crazy amounts of capital. And in some ways it looks even more capital consumptive than ever before. And I don't feel like I have a good mental model to square exactly why that's happening.
It certainly seems like it's easier to get to like a million or $2 million of ARR without hiring like anyone. Like we're used to seeing this. We get so many investor updates and usually we're used to seeing like we just hit a million ARR and we had like 10 people and now it's just like consistently like, and we haven't hired anyone. So that's like new. I agree that like the step after that though, it seems like the rounds are bigger than ever. Like they're huge.
Yeah. Right. And so, well, I mean venture is contracting a little bit. It's like not on a dollar basis. On a dollar basis like there's a quote-unquote flight to quality. And then one of the things we've been talking about internally is like the world is actually increasingly full of these mega funds that are friends and they do great work, but it's like more and more dollars behind fewer and fewer people. And so you're actually...
Yeah, fewer firms and fewer people at those firms, right? And then the natural thing is like then capital is a cudgel, like the fix is in, which is great. Like often like for YC, YC is sometimes the number one, number two and number four, you know, of any given like vertical SaaS space and we're in the billion-dollar one. We're in the half-a-billion-dollar one. We're in the 'we're the rebels' one that works with the partner. Like this happens over and over again. I mean,
So do you think in this environment then is the like kingmaking meme, is that like more true because of the capital is a cudgel thing? Like is it more effective in this type of environment?
Basically, if the founders are good, like the capital like helps them get there a little faster, but I don't believe that like capital as a cudgel...
Especially when things move so quickly, like you can end up having capital and then like moving like fast in the wrong direction.
Like Harj funded Giga. Yeah. And these guys beat, I mean we love Bret, we love Sierra. But yeah, like Giga, this sort of 10-person team beat all the incumbents for, you know, things like DoorDash. I mean the back-to-back-to-back, it's like they have the best tech and I think they're maybe like still under 20 people right now.
And speaking of like insiders versus outsiders, that's such like a classic like insider versus outsider story. I mean what were the backgrounds of the Giga founders?
Oh, like they went to IIT in India.
They were still in India when...
Yes, they were in India when. They actually couldn't make it out here for the batch for visa reasons, but they were just like brilliant. They were clearly like brilliantly smart. They were like the top-ranked IIT students. They had done their sort of, as undergrads, they'd done sort of PhD-level research in fine-tuning LLMs before like everything really took off. So they were just like clearly exceptional.
Now, yeah, I mean to this point about like the kingmaking stuff and not to like talk our own book too much, but like, you know, Lovable was a, you know, startup that was like coming behind something that seems really established and they're based in Europe and then they went through YC and they're doing great. And so it doesn't seem like stuff is like locked up immediately.
And that's a good example of like the point, like even if you have the capital, you might not build like the right product off the bat and then things change, getting better, the models getting better. So like back-to-back-to-back, like every single year the models are getting better. You know, the rumor for Harvey is that like, you know, they might have spent a bunch of money, a bunch of the VC capital on fine-tuning models that are like not better than the frontier models. I mean, you don't have a crystal ball. You couldn't have guessed that that, you know, it was just an idea that maybe that might happen. Of course, it did happen. And then now we're sort of in this situation where like, you know, if you have hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in your bank account, you're tempted to use it.
The models thing is so interesting to me because one of the things that has struck me is that a lot of the source of product market fit actually exists outside the startup delivering the service. And so it's, you know, like you take an amazing founder like Max, you put them in a market like legal where there's just a lot of uptake for some set of reasons and then it's like you have this tailwind outside the startup that's actually driving a lot of the like aha moment, not to take away from anything that they've done, but this is the case for all these startups. And so that just sort of changes some things to me. This is from the venture's perspective at least and a reason why they're raising the bigger B rounds.
One of, I mean there's always that case of just like bank the money while you can get it, but it just feels like the surface area for the products is bigger than ever and they are like still fundamentally constrained on like the number of people they have to go and execute on things. And it feels like we're now, the SaaS era was sort of like you build one core feature and you hit product market fit with that and maybe just run with that for a few years and then add on things. Whereas now it's like even within the batch people are trying to like add like more into the product and have it do more. And so they just fundamentally feel constrained by how much they feel they should be. And then they have competitors and the competitors are moving faster. So I haven't as yet seen that like once you're post product market fit, it doesn't feel like that, oh, people won't need to hire as many, or they're at least not acting on the belief they don't need to hire as many people yet.
I would say one thing that doesn't seem automated yet is sales, for example. Like it seems like you still, a lot of people thought that it would be automated by now. It hasn't been automated by now. Support has, but sales hasn't. And so like you still need a lot of salespeople. It seems like, you know, engineers are way more effective, but if you've got the capital, 50 engineers still going to be better than five engineers. So, like, I think some of these things just haven't necessarily played out intuitively.
It's great for everyone using the products. It just like the bar for like what you expect out of like the products you use just keeps going up and up, which is awesome. There's also a lot of these markets that are so genuinely blue ocean and like they look like good ideas and they are good ideas and it's totally new. And so the result of that is 50 startups doing something similar and I think that's like a good thing for end consumers.
Obviously you guys have a lot of companies that are in that situation like we all do. I'm curious like how you, you know, in this competitive of a market moment when every startup's got a ton of competition, like does that change anything? Like when you're working with like specific companies, do you find yourself saying you need to go faster? You need to be thinking about something differently? Does it update anything when we're in this type of environment?
I felt like Gary was holding back in the answer.
What's that? I'm hoping you guys have a good answer. I can answer my own question by the way.
I guess the reason maybe why we're pausing on it is again just the YC like getting things off the ground. It's usually...
I know especially during the batch we're so focused in on the like is this even like is this worth investing like another two weeks of your time in and sort of like the units of time.
Is there a glimmer of product market or anything? And that doesn't really have to do with competition at all.
Exactly. And so I feel like we actually spend the vast majority of our time talking about competition telling founders not to worry about competition because it's all founders who are like, like imagine if the Lovable founders had like not launched Lovable because they had looked at Harvey and been like, oh, it's over. That's what we see a hundred times over is that story. And so it's just being like, don't worry about it, like just out-execute them.
Yeah. I think we always just go back to the make something people want and that like it says make something people want. It doesn't say like do a market map.
Yeah. Based on what, you know, Perplexity tells you about.
You could add that. You could say make a market map and then make something people want within it.
That'd be, we should make an April Fool's t-shirt that says that. It's like make a market map then make something people want. It's like what the hell are you talking about? Like that's definitely not how you do this.
So like let's say like somebody's working on customer support. Like I'm pretty like that market is not saturated. Like I'm pretty confident that a good team that comes into customer support and is like I'm going to go find some more customers, like they could do it. And so basically the view is just like hey, if you can find customers and you get it going, like don't even think about who else is out there, just go.
I think that's basically, I mean like it's like go out and get customers and if you have good competition then like you have a hard time getting customers. It's like and if I try and launch a new payment processor I'm going to run into Stripe and like it's going to be hard for me to grow really quickly. And I think that ends up being a lot of the advice during the batch.
Yeah. I'm curious how much you guys think at like a macro level about stuff because I know like the most important thing, which I believe obviously correct, is to think about the micro getting this startup off the ground and going and then things can go from there. I am curious about some of the like macro things. Like one of the ones that comes to mind for me is like the recent, you know, trend in public markets about sort of like SaaS multiples just getting totally hammered. Do you guys feel like SaaS is dead? Does that resonate for you? Do you see anything different in the companies you're working with?
I mean, I think it's dead. The thing is it doesn't, if you run a SaaS company, you don't have to be dead. All you have to do is embrace Claude Code or you have to embrace, you know, a top-to-bottom agentic view of like how everything's going to work. Like put it this way, like the same week that I personally realized that everything was different, you know, I funded a team from Meta Superintelligence who had left and they were pointing out like, you know, Meta has 20,000 people working on reality, you know, Alexa has 20,000 people. And it's like, and I thought about my experience. It's like I didn't even have like 20,000 people. I had five people. And like why did it take two years? Well, it's because like I knew what the architecture was. I knew what I wanted to build. And then I had to farm this out. But then I had to have meetings and I had to, you know, come up with a doc and then other people have other opinions and we have like five meetings about like the architecture and like we argue about it and then, you know, two weeks later like maybe something happens. But if you're in a big company, it's like three months later something maybe happens. And it's like look, like we don't have to do that now. Like we could just try both. Like go into plan mode and then just do it. And then literally like an hour later we will have something done that would have taken like two weeks, two months or sometimes two years for if you're not a tech company and you know you're an incumbent, like it's like two years or never that you would even make that decision, right? So like the speed of making that decision, like how decisive you can be, like honestly I think like going back to the transformation thing, like that's actually the thing that I feel like I learned at YC. It's not like I didn't know how to do it, it's just that like I was, for, you know, I was employee number 10 of Palantir, like we were moving, like I was sleeping at the office. The big difference was realizing like instead of, you know, getting 20 basis points of Palantir, which now is actually an astronomical amount of money by the way, like we didn't know it at the time. I was like...
We'll run some math, we'll put the math up on the screen.
Oh, that's a thumbnail, that's perfect.
Yeah, I mean basically I wanted 97% of the company that I started, right? And then...
I think that that's, I went from a place where it was already fast and then being the founder and the CEO, like YC sped me up even more because you're in office hours with people and it's like, oh man, this person actually grew 10% this week, 20% this week, like how did they do it? I need to do it. And I think all of this is an accelerant, like Claude Code and Codex and being able to like make two years' worth of product progress in about two weeks. How could that not make YC more insane?
Totally. Like the amount of things that you could try and do. It's like honestly you could do two years of work, realize that like actually nobody wants this or there's too much competition and you throw it out and then do it again. And the thing is like that's not throwaway. You learn something. You also got better at like using these tools and then you went out and you get another shot. And so what's funny about like seed is you could think of people raising like $2 or $3 million, you know, that used to be Series A by the way, which is hilarious.
Yeah. Yeah. I was like, 'Oh, that's kind of a small seed.' It's like, are you serious? That's so much money. This is outrageous. You don't even need this money.
It's crazy that you can go so much faster.
I actually, I do want to come back to fundraising advice because I feel like it's gotten into an interesting place there. But the opposite question of is SaaS dead is what do you feel is not AI but safe from AI? Like are there areas where you feel that you think are sort of insulated from this mega trend that you're like happy to back without...
I think the obvious one, yeah, on the first, just like marketplaces that are like aggregating people. I think Airbnb is like very safe. I think what's not safe, I think there's a bunch of marketplaces, since DoorDash is totally safe. It's going to be a very clear one. Right. One of the things we've been talking about is what the agents want, what the coding agents tell you to do turns out to be like itself a really big moat. So GEO, like making your API docs like actually written to prompt inject Claude Code to force it to use you. I'm just joking, like it's not clear that you can do that, but like if you could you would because it's that powerful. Like people will just, I need X and then you know what's the best thing on the internet to do that and actually that's really powerful. I mean, I think the other...
Thing you might say like going maybe the SaaS thing is like even within SaaS, you might say like things that feel like they are essentially databases or systems of records, things like Rippling feel like they're going to be in a good spot. And then things where they like the moat was around the number of integrations they built or like data connectors or that kind of stuff which you can now just like close code in 30 minutes is brittle.
Do you think it's system of record that makes payroll sticky or do you think it's touching money?
Touching money, regulatory. I mean, once it's you, I mean, you have systems that are working, you don't want to touch that unless you have a really good reason.
Yeah, because like one of the ones that comes up a lot right now is like, are CRMs safe? You know, like our old, which I don't have any, I don't have actually a particularly strong opinion to, but it just seems like an interesting question where it doesn't exactly touch money, doesn't exactly touch regulatory, includes a lot of information that's important, but like that information also now can like live in email or somewhere else like that though.
Yeah, I think that I think Salesforce is probably screwed. Like I feel like there have been so many attempts to do the Stripe strategy of you get the startups in the YC batch using your CRM because everyone hates Salesforce, but no one could ever really grow into a big company because at some point your head of sales is like, 'No, I need like these reports.'
To your point, you need the integrations badly.
Exactly. And now like that's all just going away. So I don't, I suspect like the next Salesforce is going to come out of like a YC batch that sells to all the other YC startups and investors will say, 'Oh, like it's not going to grow because like no one can really compete with Salesforce and like...
Also all its customers are YC companies. It can't be.'
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Company.
Yeah.
What about hardware? Is hardware safe?
Hard tech is just hard. So the moat comes from it being just, you know, hard to source, hard to make it work. Like you have, I mean, it's just another like...
But the AI hasn't exactly...
The AI hasn't exactly come for atoms yet.
Yeah, robotics is still a little ways, but we just need more, we need ASI. We have, I think we have AGI now and then ASI is coming, like superintelligence is just clearly...
Just around the corner.
You think it'll just be like a when we know we know, or you think there will be like a thing that to you would say that like that new moment is here?
