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"Run Towards Growth" Career Advice From ex-YC COO and Applied Intuition CEO Qasar Younis · Giant Ideas

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Health, family, work, and social life.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: I can tell you in my case, I've never had a social life.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: I can't tell you the last time I went out, I don't, you know, maintain a group of friends.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's just not been important to me.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, and welcome to Giant Ideas with me, Cameron McLean, and me, Tommy Stadlin.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: We're co-founders of Giant Ventures, which builds and backs purpose-driven companies.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: At Giant, we're lucky to meet extraordinary people with giant ideas that are changing the world.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast brings you behind-the-scenes access to those ideas and the inspiring stories of the people behind them.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: We explore how one giant idea can kickstart a billion-dollar company, shape culture, and transform life as we know it.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Last week, we spoke to the founder of Applied Intuition, Casa Yunus.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: He's built a$15 billion physical AI giant.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: Today, though, we're going to talk to him about the lessons he's learned in his incredible life journey.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Growing up on a farm in Pakistan, moving to Detroit to the shadows of the car industry that he's now disrupted so powerfully, but crucially also running Y Combinator, the best startup school in history that has produced so many of Silicon Valley's greatest companies.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to talk about the lessons from YC and the lessons in career building that I think are so relevant to many of the people in our audience.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Casa, welcome back to Giant Ideas.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Last week we talked a lot about applied, amazing company,$15 billion business you've built.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: But in some ways, when I was researching this, the most interesting bits for me were A, your life journey, which is kind of amazing, B, your career advice.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think you've got the most strategic career advice of any of the guests that I've interviewed.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then CY Combinator.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to talk about all those things.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think we'll start with career advice.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us about the lesson you learned from this Harvard professor on making good strategic decisions about which industry to be in.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: Top of the list is it's better to be in a high growth business industry than it is to be in a mediocre industry.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: You could be a, you could be, you could be the best at a mediocre industry and you can be mediocre in a high growth industry.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: And the mediocre person in the high growth industry does financially better and has a bigger impact and all those things.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: So today there's a lot of anxiety around AI, especially for new grads who are like, oh, well, what job should I take?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: And should they kind of almost like this instinct to run away from it and kind of look back at the past, maybe.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's important when you feel that anxiety of something in your career, not to just instinctively run away from it.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: Like maybe look at it and try to find where the growth is and try to run towards that growth.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: And um especially early in your career, you I think you'll get rewarded a lot more than anything else.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so for you, that decision was you were in the in the auto industry.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: You you'd kind of grown up in Detroit after moving from Pakistan, which we'll talk about.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: You were in the auto industry doing, I imagine, very well.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: But so what happened?
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Someone told you actually this is not the best industry to be in.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: That's really, you know, uh tough advice when that's all you know and you grow up with.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I made a very pragmatic and dispassionate move.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I moved to the Bay Area.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: I moved to Silicon Valley because Detroit is a great place for making cars.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, making software is really done there.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I think there's probably another takeaway there for career advice, which is it is very important that you learn from and are around really competent people.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so if there's anything that you should uh optimize beyond just finding an industry that's growing, is to be around people who are very good at that, at their jobs.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, again, a little controversial, almost at any cost.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't care really about compensation.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: I say this as somebody who didn't have money growing up and had to pay my own way.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't care about compensation.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't care about title.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't um, and again, it's all within just, you know, you have to be thoughtful here.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not saying take the worst job offer because that's uh sometimes not the right answer as well.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: But the person, the people you're gonna learn from, that is really important.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: More mid mid uh mid-career and uh I would say later uh in your career, it depends again on where where you're where you're at, um, as you're technical, non-technical, et cetera.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um I do think in your what you're optimizing changes the moment you have kids, the moment you have your parents are getting older and you have other responsibilities.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you you have to be actually more thoughtful.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: You can't just say, I'm gonna start a company at 45.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: I I'm not in that camp uh that even starting a company is for everybody.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I think I think you have to be a bit more thoughtful.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: But with that being said, I think the mistake that you can make in mid or late career is like, well, I spent 15 years at McKinsey.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: So I I gotta, it's like that's fine.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: You did like the the the constraints we have in our brain, the cultural constraints are actually way bigger than the actual constraints of changing jobs and learning new things.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Where is the puck going today?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: So for for for me and for you, it was like get to Silicon Valley, build technology companies, software companies originally.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, where I mean AI obviously, but what what should people be thinking about?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like, this is the future, go build your career in this industry.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what are you gonna value at the end of your existence?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: And what are the constraints that you have today?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: And for me, the constraints when I was younger was I don't have any money.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so that that was a big deal.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that was the driving function.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: Only like as an adult, it came to my realization that actually everybody isn't like desperately poor.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like, it's like all my decisions were made very easily.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of like, you know, when I was at General Motors, they said the Corvette is the easiest uh, you know, program to work on because everybody knows how the decisions are going to be made.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: You want to figure out what that true north is.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: And the way that you kind of figure out, or at least the the recommendation I would have is yeah, you're at the end of your life and you look back and what is the stuff that you want around you, then you work backwards from there.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's completely okay if it's not AI and working at a venture-backed company or being a founder.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: There's a million paths to success.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: Success is just too narrowly defined.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you're talking about you've already gone through that exercise and you've concluded you want to be in the technology business, how do you uh what what to work on?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's a better time than ever to be a founder.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: It is easily the best time.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: There's a couple of reasons for that.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: Number one, uh, there's more capital available than ever.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, there are literally more professional and institutional grade capital available in almost all parts of the planet, never existed before.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: You can literally go to small countries now that have VCs.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: That wasn't even the case in London 25 years ago.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: You have other things as well.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: You have people who want to join startups.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: That was actually sometimes more difficult than raising capital, which is like you have to convince people that, you know, it was the default when I was coming out of Harvard was go to McKinsey, go to Bain, go to BCG, go to Goldman, there's go to uh BlackRock, go to Blackstone.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: The handful advent, there's not many companies, you know, it was Bing Cap, I should say.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: And that was it.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: That was those are the least things.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: Now it's like the default is I want to find a young company, which is great because if you're a founder, that means all these people who are very qualified actually look at the thing that you're doing as something they can join.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: I think probably the third reason uh to to to to to be a founder is I think it's a rare job if you can deal with the stress and all the kind of the downstream impacts of it.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's a rare job that you kind of get almost everything.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_02: You get control over your destiny, you get to make impact, you get to work on places and projects and products that you want to work on, and you have a good financial outcome.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like it's an amazing positive thing.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: You you you know, I it's incredible that you can actually have a job which is like net net can be hugely positive for your community, you, yourself, and and you don't feel bad about it.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's uh yeah.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: So you so you grew up in Pakistan in a rural environment, right?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Around farms and maybe.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was in a farm.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I grew up.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Grew up on a farm.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us what what that was like.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us about the the early early years.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: My parents are farmers and we lived in a uh house without electricity or running water.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: And we came to the US.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: My uncle, I was in elementary school, so I was I was young.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but we came to the US because my uncle got a job at General Motors.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: He had he got a student visa to go to the US, and then from student visa, he got a job at General Motors and he ultimately sponsored us.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that's how I ended up moving to Warren, Michigan, which is kind of the home of General Motors.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: How old were you?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I was uh seven, seven years old.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I was like second grade, third grade.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: So you very much remember life in Pakistan before.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: What are your memories?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I mean, that's that's a funny, very personal question.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I've never been asked that question.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, uh, yeah, I mean, not having stuff.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you remember in the sense of like, you know, you drink well water and you, you uh, you know, all of your day is consumed by like these trivial things.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: And like, you know, remember like, you know, going to school.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I actually moved to another village because my parents' village didn't have a you know, school.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_02: And um, and so I had lived with my grandparents and they're there, they're they actually had a had a uh school at their village.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: So like just that experience of like it's suddenly being told to you, this is so important that you're gonna actually move somewhere to get educated.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that had that had a long, long-term impact.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: You know, once I got in my head as a you know young person that um starting a business is the way to nonlinear wealth accumulation.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: And that was a very explicit thought that I had.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: How do you make money?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: I remember so I started working at McDonald's when I was 14 and and um and the one of the the owner came in once, you know, he owns like whatever, a dozen McDonald's in the area.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: We were asking the store manager, oh, who's that?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: I remember he had a Porsche 911, which is ironic because I work with Porsche 911.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, you know, it's like uh how the world is full full circle.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: You grew up in in the shadows of the car industry, the old large, but you're now transforming.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a crazy, crazy.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: What are the managers telling you?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and he said, as uh she said, uh, oh, that's just the owner, and he like every month will swing by and make sure operations are going by.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember thinking, like, what are we?
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: We're just what are we doing here?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: We're the idiots.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: We're the idiots.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I'm getting paid a$4.75 an hour, and this guy has the nicest car, and he's showing up once a month.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like, and then like that triggered in a fairly young age that actually being an owner is the thing.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: So, my macro recommendation, if you could in on on current just career and kind of what I what I was like, if you can somehow dissect and remove your ego from the equation, you see, and I'm I'm very much in the in the camp of emotions are not helpful.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think they they they deform the problem that you're looking at.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so that's the engineer in me.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you ideally want to be fairly objective and clinical about the thing that you want and how you're gonna get there and why you're not, you know, why you're not doing those things.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so let's take the being a founder.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: Let's say you kind of see you want to be a founder, but you've never actually started a company in your mid 30s and you you still work at, let's say, whatever, big, big co, uh, you know, and so like why isn't that why is very important.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I think if you can't have that honest conversation, some people can't, yeah, um, then you might always be in that cycle.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: There is a version of the honest conversation, and it's like, hey, I have a family and I or I have a lifestyle, and I like going out on the weekends, and I like having, you know, the one of the uh things that crossed over X uh uh recently that that I'm sure people have seen before, but it's like the you only get four burner, like it's like a stove and you only get four uh four burners uh uh and only three of them can be on.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, you know, your health, family, work, and social life.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I can tell you in my case, you know, talking about me, I've never had a social life.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: I can't tell you the last time I went out, I don't, you know, maintain a group of friends, and that's important to a lot of people.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: They they they look at me like, well, that's the richness of life, and it's just not been important to me.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it's fascinating.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: That's yeah, it's and it's I I don't I I used to be very insecure about this, but uh, you know, as I've become well, I'm just me now.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like I can't be anybody other than how extreme are you on that?
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, do you have kind of a small group of like two or three or four very close friends, or you've been it's like family and work and that's it?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's more that.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's more than it.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: I I even avoid group text chats and stuff like that.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: I I I uh people ask me all the time, like, oh, uh, you know, how do you how do you have time for all this stuff?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: And as a company, especially as grown.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't struggled that much with with time.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think if you try if I was trying to jam in two or three more things, even honestly, one more thing, yeah, even doing a dinner a week, it just disrupts everything.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I like you like just just just like uh a very tactical example for the founders out there, uh the especially the uh if your company is like under five years, you know, I I again I'm not saying you should do this, but I'm just giving you a template.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: I work seven days a week and I always have.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: And from when I was at you know McDonald's, I had a couple of jobs when I was in high school, uh, three jobs at one point, or most of the time I should say.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: And then uh, you know, all the way to now, I'm in, you know, in my uh early mid 40s now.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: And um the the seven days a week thing has always been very productive.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so what is the Saturday and Sunday?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: The Saturday and Sunday is I go to a coffee shop and I'll work for four to five hours alone, and I just clean up all my slack, I get through all my to-dos, I and let my brain think.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I think, oh, I saw this thing about, you know, about Fable and let me research that and like just having time to just do like the memory cleanup and the like defragging that needs to happen.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if there's one thing that's made me successful, it's actually that.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: The evenings and the weekends are also the time when you're not being distracted by by endless requests of your time.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: And but if you're running to a dinner, yes, if you're running to friends and your fr, you know, your friends depend on you and they're having a serious issue with their health or their their family or their relationships or their career, you know, I found it very hard not to give time to that.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so that that's and again, I'm not saying this is the right thing.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I and it might be one of these things that, you know, when I'm in my 60s, I look back and I say, hey, that was the big mistake.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: Like I should, you know, I should have lived a different life.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: If you look at all of these posts of people who are passing away, they almost always consistently say, I should have worked less, I should have spent more time with friends and family.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, it's it's a very conflicted piece of advice.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: It is it's very notable though that I I would say, I mean, it's just the hard reality that, you know, lots of the people like you who've had extraordinary lives and really created very, very big outcomes from giant ideas work basically all the time.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it is the hard reality that a lot of people don't grasp that to achieve those kind of outcomes, basically you have to work harder, a lot harder than the average and sacrifice stuff.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: We had very different worlds, but Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the UK and the former number two at Meta.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: And he, I asked him, you know, how did he how's he done it?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: And he basically said, you know, he seems very gregarious and kind of sociable.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: And he, you know, him and his wife, who is very is a very successful lawyer and and potentially politician, she said they they basically never went to dinner parties.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, they had they they worked extremely hard and they tried to be good parents, and and that was kind of it.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you can't add the extra stove to it.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's kind of like the the analogy of this at work is uh at a at applied intuition, we we have uh I write internal posts, and one of the first posts we ever wrote is just about meetings and meeting culture.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: And um, what happens, especially in big companies, is people start thinking the meetings are the work, and that's actually not the work.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: In this like larger life example, people start saying going to an event or going to a conference or going to a dinner, that that's the work because you're learning about the ecosystem.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: In venture, there's some truth in that because that's that's kind of part of the game, is getting information, learning information, and understanding where your peers are thinking.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: But in the making aspect, so not the funding, the making aspect, it's making.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly, this is not for everyone, obviously.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: But what I think is interesting is that I think there are founders in Europe and perhaps New York and some other geos who think that they are living the life that is going to get them to what you've got and others who've made it have got.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they're willing to make the sacrifice, but they they actually don't realize that it is kind of a seven days a week, highly, highly uh full of sacrifice, and because they just don't know, they're not aware that they would like to go do that, but they're not aware of this true sacrifice that's required.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and there's a thing that we haven't talked about.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's sometimes analogies are helpful.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, like imagine if we were just talking about this is a podcast about be making a great band, and everything we've talked about being a band.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: So you take all the analogies you talk about, you gotta you gotta put the reps in, you gotta be a master of your instrument.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: There's also this kind of thing about taste and like understanding what the market wants.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I like you use Nirvana as a good example in the sense of Kirk O'Bain simultaneously knew how to make catchy music, but like uh dislike that fact.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: And when it was like what like you as a as a founder, you have to somehow understand like where do you sit with your skill set and the thing that you're making and where the market is.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: And it's something that's not actually talked about enough, is like the founder has to know like how their company relates to everything around them.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: And then that's really important.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's not only the simple version of that is is just competition, but it's it's not that, or the market that's growing, but it's products, it's how their ability to recruit or their lack of ability to recruit, their ability to be um charismatic to venture capitalists or or not to fundraise or not.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's what you have to once, I think I think good founders kind of really understand like where all of that stuff is not only their own personal strengths and weaknesses, personal strengths and weaknesses of a team.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: So now you, it's like uh it's it's much more complex.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh then you can actually kind of kind of uh uh maybe put the company in the right position.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: I often see founders take somebody else's playbook and try to like, you know, it's kind of like there you can't become Nirvana by copying Kirk Cobain.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: You can't be like this, you know, depressed guy living, no, that's that's not how it's gonna work.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: But you can learn that this is the way Nirvana actually became huge.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: And they used MTV because that was the thing.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so you have to kind of so you as a founder have to like almost like learn how to play the game.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think YC is the most influential organization company in startup history, full stop.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think the the culture that it's created, the lessons that it's imbued that are now so mainstream it is kind of extraordinary.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: YC is like in in modeled speak, it's like uh distillation of actually uh Silicon Valley.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: So there's interestingly nothing about YC which didn't exist before.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: But no one put it in that package to consume like YC did.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and when I mean consume, I mean like the scale to get to lots of people's brains and things like that.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: So and the Silicon Valley culture, in a way, is a distillation of probably just Intel.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: It is a bunch of companies in those early days, CHP and some others, but Intel really has a huge, huge influence.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: Andy Grove specifically.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: All of the the learnings from YC, they're they're freely available, right?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: Paul Graham's essays are out there, but it's all for free.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: Anyone can can consume it.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: And yet there is something about being part of YC, even though it's only three months.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: The community, the network you build, the halo effect of the brand.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: What what what is it to you that makes YC so powerful for its graduates now?
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: Now is different.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I left almost 10 years ago.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: So it's let's talk about both.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: Let's talk about then and now.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_02: I said, yeah, that yeah, that's probably better.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: It it 10 years ago.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, part of it is that's applied to both is like the four-minute mile.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: You're around founders.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like this is one thing that's interesting about the valley is uh, and I think it's happening in more cities, like you know, you see Lovable and you see Lagora, suddenly you're like, you can build a big company in Stockholm.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: So important.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: Role model so important.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like the four-minute mile.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: Once you see something, and then like in the Bay Area, the the first buddy that makes a big, you're like, oh, you know, uh Kyle got got successful.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: Not a particularly smart man, but he's he's he's successful.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: Then, like, you know, then Michael does it, and you're like, oh my that's that's that's interesting.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: And then by the fourth, you're like, okay, what am I doing on the sidelines?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: I can do this as well.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's a really important thing.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's and and a YC, I think at the minimum, it just shows you the playbook.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: That it's not a mystery.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's like the mag if, if, you know, it's the magician is a magician until you see all the tricks.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: And then you're like, oh, it's just a this there's some some mechanics, and I can learn those mechanics and I can be a magician.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: That that exists at both times.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think in that era, the older, let's say, let's say YC from 2005, 2010.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like that era, the first first 10 years.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that is really a downstream funnel from hacker news.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: It was in a Paul, Paul's essays were were everything.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I remember when I went to the interview, I remember a majority of the reason I went to the interview is just to meet Paul Graham.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: Paul Graham, founder of YC.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: I shake his hands and I remember thinking distinctly thinking, oh, we have an interview.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: Like I like, like I was so like uh lost in the fog.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: You know, because I think Paul, you know, is is is you know had some of the best ideas, you know, like really, really, really great ideas.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like uh um, and I'm like a connoisseur of ideas in that way.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so so that so it was it was a different, it was, it was frankly like I felt like a, I was like a like a devotee.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: And that was the era of YC where it was actually the Paul Graham show.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: And um today, it's very different.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's not even uh who runs YC.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: No, Gary Tan.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: Gary Gary was actually uh one of partners when I when I went through as a founder in 2010.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, 2011.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's it is.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Gary is important to the but it's YC and supersedes actually you know any individual.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so today it's much more an institution.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um you run it with SO with Soccerman.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_02: So Sam was the president, I was the CO.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and that was you could say the middle ground.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: So there's the early years, that was the middle ground.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's like the new, the new era.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and all three of those eras are different.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: The first Paul Graham era I talked about, let me talk about a little bit of the the Sam and I.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: That era was the institutionalization of YC, which is taking it from a family business, you know, the hacker news server on in Paul's kitchen to making it actually like a modern uh web application, et cetera.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: All those little things, um, just getting the brand out a lot more.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I remember doing London uh uh startup school, you know, first time we ever did it was was uh out here.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: And uh that was over 10 years ago.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: So that was that era.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: The current era is the, and this is actually about Silicon Valley as much as about YC, it's the industrialization era.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's everything at that, you know, much bigger scale.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the influences, the the reach that Gary has actually is is now Paul is kind of a celebrity, so it's it's it's slightly different, but let's say other partners that were with Paul in the early days compared to Gary's influencers, like, you know, that's a huge difference.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it Gary just has a huge influence now.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: Gary, Gary can meet heads of state.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: YC was a little collicottage thing with like you know, four people who started in uh, you know, in Cambridge.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: So uh in uh in in the US Cambridge.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, and so I think today the the the just size, scale, and scope is huge.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: The the the downside is it's just bigger, right?
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: So as an individual person who's who's a founder who's going through, I I did all my office hours with Paul Graham.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think back that's like extraordinary.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing, yeah.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um amazing, right?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, so I think that you know, you don't get that now.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, in YC's defense, um the partners today might actually have more reps on helping companies than even the early partners did.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: Because early partners, you know, a batch when it's 10 or 20, yeah, the whole batch is 10 or 20.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: Now it's like a partner might work with 50 companies in the first time around and they do three or four batch, and suddenly they have a huge corpus of knowledge.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's I think people always want to, I think the inclination always is to try to compare better or worse.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's just different.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: And the but the key thing is everything around it's different too.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: I think that old YC wouldn't work today.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: And uh the it would be very difficult.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe not sort of which which era is better or worse, but just sort of why were why were each era very successful?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: There isn't really a second or third place accelerator incubator that's anywhere close to it.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's so far away at the best.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that is because of the quality of people doing it?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: Is it now the brand halo effect?
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Is there an element of like, well, they because they got the brand, they can simply attract the best people and you know, it sort of does it, does it itself?
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: I only wrote one map post when I was at YC and it was called We Make Mistakes.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: And it was actually written after we had given all these people admission.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: It was whatever batch I wrote it in 2014 or 2015, whatever it was.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, you know, for everyone who just got rejected, we make mistakes.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: But actually, for everyone who also got in, we also make mistakes.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: Just because you got in means nothing.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, did like the so I think there's a lot more, the tolerances are a lot looser than than than one thinks.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot more of those calls.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so understanding that, then I also realized that that stuff compounds.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: So you have to be careful in in, and one of the reasons you have today the phenomena that you have in the valley is where it's basically once you become a consensus, frankly, speaking applied intuition, is is one of those.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, like everybody just wants to put money in.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: And that's actually not always the case.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, like that doesn't necessarily mean the company is very good.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: It just means like you kind of checkboxed enough enough things.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: And that actually reminds more of like you and being an employee.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's like a manager, and you say now you just do all the right things and you just get the check marks and you get the money.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that's actually so what should you be looking at?
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: You should be looking at the product.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: Is the product what the market wants?
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's all those are the that's the only interactions you really care about.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's a macro.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: Especially early with go like with seed stage companies, you really got to be careful about this is a consensus company season.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think when it's so early that you can't do the product market assessment, yeah, you really have to be looking at are these people, are they, you know, formidable?
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: Are they determined and are they intelligent?
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: And do they work well with each other?
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: Do they have the core, you know, components?
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: The elements to make YC successful are actually quite different in those eras.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: In that first era, I think nothing really existed like it.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: That's the hacker news community, that's the the Stripe brothers, that's you know, that that's that whole crew that that emerged and which I caught, you know, part of that.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I fall into it.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's funny because when I joined, when I got into YC and I thought we were already late because it was like five years into the system.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: And now it's like we're part of the OG crew, which is like so weird uh to think.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, that's you know, that's when Gary Tan just starts working there.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, and and so I think what made it successful at that point is there really wasn't anything like it.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: And it was like, it was like uh using the analogy from earlier, it was like the studio that it that somehow attracted the right type of person.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: And my hypothesis, having gone through the whole thing, and you know, is I think Hacker News just filtered out people.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: And it was like if you're in Hacker News in 2006, 2007, you're different person.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: You're in 2026, it's different as well.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but it was like so niche that you have to somehow find that thing.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, you know, why are there like certain clubs in New York that the Ramones played at and then a bunch of other good bands played at?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: Somehow they all kind of figured out to get there.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: So that was that YC era.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_02: The era of Sam Altman and myself, though, being, you know, president CEOs uh uh respectively, I think very much was hey, let's just get, it's like we're the we're like uh the evangelical area.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: We're the 12 apostles, right?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: The messiah's gone.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, I want to say it was pretty easy work, right?
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: In the sense of like you, you had this great source material.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: And um, we I mean, we had great investments that are.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, forget the open AI uh thing, but yeah, it's like DoorDash was there and Coinbase and Flexport, and I mean there's so many great companies that came out.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_02: Interestingly, and importantly to note, at that point, the criticisms that we would get at YC was intensely that Paul is gone, the Messiah is gone, and the best years of YC are behind us.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: And it turns out actually that it wasn't the case.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so the best devil companies came out of that era.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: But I can tell you, that was the active conversation all the time.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: That was and the best evidence you're doing something right in Silicon Valley is like people really like talk, you know, garbage about you.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, whichever, whichever venture fund is like really disliked.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: There's decent chances because they're really good.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's like everyone's competing, right?
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so then that that era, and then now you're in the the the the the curtain.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that was why it was successful.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: It was like, and I think to to give Sam credit and give all the partners that were there at the time, they were, they were all the OG folks, they were early early folks, they they care a lot about the firm.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_02: Not to say the people that don't uh uh uh now, but they cared a lot about the firm.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, we're just such like it really is the 12 apostles kind of idea.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's like people were real converts.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the zealousness of a convert, right?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and the the current era, you could say is is the industrialization era.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: Now you like I I mean, I used to, even when I worked at YC, I would say I work at Y Combinator, people were like, uh-huh.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: Because I what is that?
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, oh, it's just like, you know, in and uh now it's like that's not the case at all.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, which is which is crazy.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, which is crazy.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so today I think the what makes YC successful, I think has to be um the when you boil it all down.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_02: If you as a founder don't get good funding on the other end of YC at a high market cap, nothing else matters.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I've certainly seen founders that can't raise any money and then go through YC and raise a lot of money.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: For sure.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: Same company.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: So it is the brand, it is what people facetiously say, oh, it's just a brand or something like that.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's more than that.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but it is like it's the it's the filter mechanism.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's sure.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's the culling of of and that's a huge service, honestly, to the industry because there's so many startups.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: You know, when you talk about 2005, there are not that many startups.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: So you uh the culling is also actually less important.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: And is more just the teaching.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: The the one thing I missed is in the early, early, you know, 2005, let's say 2010, that era was there, there's really the 90s and the ear, you know, to that era is really dominated by two firms.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's Kleiner Perkins and uh Sequoia.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: And they basically split the value.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a lot of other good firms around the time, you know, uh NEA benchmark, Excel, et cetera.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: But the but that that was, you know, that was really the value.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: There they they took was it was John Dore and Mike Moritz, uh, or Doug Leon, whoever.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then um, and Paul comes around, he's like, You don't need to know me.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: You can just go online and apply.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: And that's that is a huge innovation.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's uh it's so simple.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: And he even does it, and he's talked about it where he, you know, he's did it frankly out of laziness.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: He doesn't want to just and and you know, laziness slash pragmatism in sense of just sitting at a coffee shop and hearing an angel pitch doesn't, yeah, you it's not structured.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: But when you put in an application, it's structured and you can batch it together and all the advantages you get from that.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um you fast forward to today, it's it's none of that stuff, right?
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: You do like it's there's a tons of accelerators, tons of incubators.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: And what so what does it reduce all the way down?
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_02: Even the advice is all online.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: Venture investors love to complain about how expensive companies are coming out of YC.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: The hard the hard reality is if you if you as a venture investor back a YC company coming out of YC, it is exponentially more likely, statistically, to be a 1 billion, 10 billion dollar company than anything else.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it's and I think like for all the people who complain about that, it's like, you know, it's not like YC is a monopoly.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: This is not like a state-owned enterprise.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_02: You should try to front-run YC.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: Free market.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, go ahead, try to front-run YC.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's like I think, I think then you realize like, oh, their dynamics are difficult.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_02: The one other thing that that that is that is worth uh mentioning is there is a dynamic about venture which is very important, which is um the best companies get to choose the investors and they'll just choose the investors that had the best companies.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: So um, you know, why did we take Andreessen Hornets?
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: Why do we take General Cattle?
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_02: Why do we take uh Lux, Kleiner Perkins, whoever, Elon Gill?
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's because they were all already good investors.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: Now also were friends and they're all those firms uh before.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: But um so I think YC really gets a huge advantage from that.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: Most people will be pretty satisfied with the impact you had just on YC.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I'll have a very lasting impact.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: But it's one small part of the CASA story.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um You haven't talked about YC in a long time.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's awesome to talk about it.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: We sadly have to let you go on a plane.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: We keep going for hours, but thank you so much for sharing multiple giant ideas and this incredible life journey.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's been really, really awesome.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks for having me.