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Gary Tan, welcome to the builders. >> Thanks for having me.
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>> As a leader of Y Combinator, you have to pick founders who are going to make it.
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Do you look for one particular thing or are there like 20 different models of founders that can work?
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Well, so the wild thing about Y Combinator is that um we get 80 maybe 90,000 applications a year now for uh about 800 spots.
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So it is less than a 1% acceptance rate.
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Maybe 8 to 10% of those people would get an interview uh sometimes less now.
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And the wild thing is we actually spend only 10 minutes with them for that final stage.
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Uh but the interesting thing is you know Paul Graham the founder of YC figured out that um you didn't need half an hour, you don't need an hour.
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Uh and then you could probably actually do it in about 5 minutes, but 5 minutes feels rude.
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So that's how YC ended up at 10 minutes.
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>> Well, so what do what did Paul look for and what do you look for in those 10 minutes?
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I mean it sounds uh almost too simple but um 10 minutes is a wonderful constraint.
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Kind of like how 140 characters for Twitter way back in the day was a wonderful constraint.
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If you can say something very simply that uh hits us like you know here's a user, here's a real person who has a problem and here's how the technology that we build actually solves that.
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Um we just want to know what it is and why it's awesome.
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And then if we have a little bit of extra time, we want to know why that founder is the person to go and build that thing.
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And you can do all of that in 10 minutes.
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And it's an up- down decision.
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Something like uh 10 to 15% of all self-made billionaires as of present time uh age 50 and under are uh YC alums.
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>> Well, let me ask you a real quick question then.
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Elon Musk, he walked in and you had 10 minutes with him.
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What do you think the percentage chance is that you would actually fund him? >> Oh, 100%.
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I mean, in current form, 100%. >> No, no, no, no.
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I'm saying you saw him, you didn't know he was successful.
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He was a guy who'd just been, say, ousted from PayPal.
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>> I mean, I had a managing partner meeting the other day, and that's actually one of the example questions we ask ourselves to figure out whether we're on the right track, right?
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Like by definition uh if YC is operating properly like if an Elon or a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs or you know a Drew Hston from Dropbox, a Brian Chesy from Airbnb, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, Tony Shu from Door Dash, like if someone like that walks into our office, can we say yes to them in 10 minutes?
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And you know if that answer is no, actually I'd have to rewrite everything.
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We'd have to retool everything, right?
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That is actually the the almost the only question that really matters when it comes to whether YC is doing well or not.
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>> And if you had walked in years ago, would you have accepted you? >> Um I think so.
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My startup Posterous was Dead Simple Blogs by email and um I mean I had a pretty banger demo.
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So we had something that uh I think Paul and Jessica and Trevor Blackwell, the founders of YC, uh really got immediately like um they didn't grill us at all.
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like we came up with a really good demo and they said well that makes sense and then we got funded.
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So sometimes it's that simple though.
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>> And I was creating that company uh running that company for a while.
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How fundamental was that to your ability to be at, you know, Y Combinator and to be uh making venture capital type decisions.
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>> Oh, I think it's quite important.
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I mean uh there's a Jay-Z line that I love.
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uh one of his songs he goes uh everybody wants to tell you how to do it and they never did it.
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And so I mean the entire act of being an investor in technology is actually bewildering and strange if you really think about it too long because what we're doing is selling money.
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Like tech has now become such a fundamental force in the financial world of society that um there's way more money that wants to go into tech than good opportunities.
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Um, and that's really what YC is.
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And if you look at most venture capital, like it's uh crazy that it's grown so much.
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You know, the S&P 500 is almost entirely driven by tech.
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tech. And then the wild thing that uh Paul Graham figured out uh and Jessica Livingston figured out when they first started was um you know when they started in 2005 the type of people who would get funding it would be your buddy
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at Stamford Business School, your golf buddy like maybe someone who your son went to school with at like some prep school at Harvard Westlake or what you know I mean it was like access right and so how crazy is that >> for a few millennia >> time in memorial Right. >> But do you all think you broke the back
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>> But do you all think you broke the back of that or is being a startup junkie or startup entrepreneur something that you still have to be pretty privileged and pretty connected to do?
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>> I mean it would be a mistake to say that we were actually a meritocracy, right?
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Uh but I I will say and affirm loudly that uh we aspire to be right. We will never be.
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You know, I think that the woke age of sort of like five or 10 years ago there we sort of lost sight of that that like meritocracy could never be achieved but it is a virtue to attempt to achieve it.
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Well, the reason I ask about that in terms of a startup culture, which is what you very much nurture, is [clears throat] that it used to be somebody coming out of college, take a Steve case for example, could go work at a company like a Proctor and Gamble and learn a business.
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Nowadays, it's very hard to sort of get a steady job and the economy for young people tends to depend more and more on startups.
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And yet it seems to me that unless you got a safety net, unless you're somebody who doesn't have to make sure your next meal can be paid for, you can't be in that game.
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And it leaves a lot of people out.
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I mean, that's why YC gives uh $500,000.
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For instance, when I did YC, it was only $18,000.
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Like today, you hear about seed funds and Stanford kids raising 30 million on $300 million post money evaluation.
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is like literally like it's just an idea and one person and like the company is somehow worth 300 million.
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But when I was when we were starting many years ago, it was a very small amount of money.
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You had to show that you had something that was great.
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Um, and so you that's why YC didn't stay and you know we we easily could have just stayed at 12 or $15,000.
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But I think there was a recognition that um if we want to be a thing that allows people to participate, you don't have to have rich parents.
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Like you know the half a million dollars getting into YC like you could just have an idea and you could come in and meet us for 10 minutes.
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>> You were one of the earliest employees at Palunteer.
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You got to see how Peter Teal and Alex Karp in particular really worked.
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What did you learn from their style?
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>> I realize now like if I hadn't rage quit, I would have been, you know, sort of appear to some of the, you know, real legends who really built Palunteer.
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You know, I would go on walks with Karp and he would sort of I mean, he was a philosopher, you know, he was not a technologist, I would say, but he was incredibly uh knowledgeable about the world.
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Um, one time I was sent to DC to do some demos for customers and I remember being like a 25year-old and I was in my ripped jeans and like band t-shirt and uh getting sent to stay at the Mandarin Oriental in uh DC.
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And you know, we would wonder, you know, Alex, like why are we staying at the Mandarin Oriental? Like look at us. We're just kids.
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Like we don't have to do that.
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Like just set set me up in the Motel 6.
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we're a startup and uh you know Alex looked at me and my uh my other early engineers for the Palunteer Finance product and he said guys you're going to go and talk to you know such and such general or such and such uh VP of some Fortune 500 and you're going to show this incredible software that you've built and then as you go out the door they're going to say hey yeah like how long you were in town they're they're just going to make small talk.
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And if you say, "I'm staying at the Motel 6," that says something about what Palanteer is.
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And they're going to think, you know, this is Motel 6 software. And guess what?
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Palanteer is not Motel 6 software.
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Palunteer is Mandarin Oriental Software.
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And I'm like, okay, I now I get it.
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And so, you know, yeah, I don't know.
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I I think embedded in that story is just a lot of different things.
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And I learned a lot from Alex from that.
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>> I know you've been fighting this antitrust battle.
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How important is that in order to keep innovation and startup culture?
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>> I think you know true true free market enterprise has never been tried.
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Um I think that in tech in particular uh we have very short memories.
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Um I would argue that Google itself, one of the big tech companies, uh was able to exist and thrive and become a trillion dollar company because of the actions of the DOJ with the consent decree on Microsoft.
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like Microsoft was ready to take over the web and it used its platform advantages in Windows to uh default install and take over the browser market.
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>> And do you think uh Google is now doing the same thing? >> I I would argue yes.
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The Delaware Corp sort of actually uh insists on it like the government structure itself actually insists on you're supposed to do your duty and your duty is to maximize shareholder value.
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shareholder value. So people are following the letter of the law and the spirit of like their Delaware CORB to uh close platforms like it's less and less percentage of the screen real estate if you do a Google search is even um non- Googlele properties right and so that's
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self-preferencing >> so a lot of your tech bro friends are very much against antitrust enforcement how do you have a startup culture if you're going to allow big companies to self-preference >> well I mean my view is that um we shouldn't allow self-preferencing. Um,
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Um, and then my super pro- startup stance is we should stop self-preferencing.
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We should, you know, uh, require open markets.
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Like I think the DMA in Europe, for instance, is a great example of forcing big tech to open its own platforms and, you know, not just data uh, transparency and privacy, but also portability and reverse engineering.
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like these are sort of things that allow for uh open markets and open access to startups.
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And if you ask me is big tech too powerful like I say absolutely and the answer and the antidote is little tech.
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I think it's not that unlike uh robber baron times in that you know if you own the railroads and there was a monopoly on the railroad you could set the price on literally everything else.
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And so one thing would lead to another thing and you would have multiple monopolies across both commodities and the railroad the commodities travel over.
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>> Well, wait, let's look at AI.
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I'm going to push back a bit.
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We get a whole lot of new companies.
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Anthropic, Open AI, they're all popping up.
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Somehow Apple wasn't able to self-preference and embed its own system in its own phones.
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Even Google is trying to do that where it almost forces you to use Gemini when you're using Google search and yet these other companies are doing well. >> Yeah, that's right.
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I mean I think um what's funny about the AI companies is like they're almost certainly I mean I think you can fairly say that they are the new big tech.
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Um and so I think I have concerns there as well, right?
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Critics of some of the AI companies would say that um it's possible that as the AI wars progress um there might not be open access to the latest and best frontier models that um you know those companies may gatekeep.
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>> You think they should be open that all the AI models should be open?
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I mean that that would be uh certainly the thing that supports startups and the ability for new people to create new companies and frankly new wealth and to give consumers choice.
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>> So what is the role that Y Combinator wants to play in AI?
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>> I mean what's funny is I I think of YC almost as like a you know we're not a union but we have union-like characteristics.
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There's not really a group out there that can speak fullthroatedly about policies and frankly actions that both governments and companies should take to make sure that the golden goose can still exist.
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And you know whether that's the billionaire tax in California or antitrust laws in DC or in Europe, we're going to start talking about it and just you know having a seat at the table.
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you know having a seat at the table. One of the things I discovered um as I started examining you know politics we're most tech people are not interested in politics but politics sure is interested in us and so I I decided like three or four years ago like oh
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well I should probably spend some time and reciprocate like let me understand what's going on and what I discovered was pretty wild I mean millions of dollars in astroturf money uh going to groups that would take around um basically almost hired actors they would
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claim to speak for small software companies or you know little tech and uh they were just like paid chills actually and uh they would go to the halls of power whether it's Sacramento or uh DC and they would say no no like this thing that actually mainly helps big tech we
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the little guy really wants that and I was like oh wow this is crazy like no real startups actually go out there and talk to real people in DC and um I saw a system that was broken and um I wanted to fix it and so that you know we do very little things like we have a tiny budget. It's you know uh probably
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It's you know uh probably 1/100th that of like even any given single big tech firm spends on policy.
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We have one lone full-time hire in DC in a man named Luther Low and um we run it on a shoestring but on the other hand like we're people powered.
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I see that like a repeating pattern like there are broken things in society.
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broken things in society. uh there are systems out there that you know have money just trace the money and like you know where's the money coming from and who who benefits right um and then the heartening thing you know I I think a lot of people talk about social media in
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a very negative way they think you know it was Facebook that ruined democracy and it's like I don't really I don't think I agree like I think that it's um the little guy not realizing he has a voice he and she do have a voice and then you know that that when I look at YC like our job one is to find the next great founders. But uh I think right
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But uh I think right under that it's like how do we make sure that those people can have access to markets?
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How do we help people who would not have a voice, would not be able to go to DC?
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Um how do we give them that megaphone?
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And then YC itself now has a megaphone.
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You know, we have more than 2 million subscribers on YouTube.
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We can sort of speak in aggregate.
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And uh I'm really excited about that like because I think that that's us trying to speak truth to power.
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Like I don't want to deny that YC is also a power in in and of itself, but the world is full of systems.
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These are all systems that were created and constructed by as Steve said it people know smarter or better than you or I.
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And you know we can mold it and change it and once you realize that uh you'll never be the same.
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>> Uh you were born in Canada, Chinese background.
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Tell me how important you think immigration is uh to the United States.
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I mean I I shout to everyone who will hear that um about 50% of all the startups that really make it have at least one immigrant co-founder.
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And what we realize is uh that's one of the things that makes America incredibly unique.
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That uh people from around the world want to come here and in tech they want to come and build the future.
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And uh that's certainly my story.
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You know my mom's family came over from Burma refugees.
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My dad uh came here from Singapore.
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>> You talk about your dad and we biographers tend to believe it's sometimes about dad, especially when somebody's successful.
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You had a pretty rough time though.
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I mean, your father was at times unemployed, at times an alcoholic.
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Tell me how you had to deal with all that.
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>> I mean, it really made me who I who I am today.
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I figured out that I can actually uh put myself back into let's say 1992.
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you know, I'm uh 11 years old and basically I don't know when my dad would come home, like maybe around five or six.
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Um but I wouldn't know how many beers he would have had already had.
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And um I realized like there's sort of this scanner that happens where um if you don't know what what father is coming home that day, then um you get very attuned to other people and uh you know their their inner states and like how to sort of react to that.
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Um, and then it's interesting because now I realize like that's a scanner that I use all the time.
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Like I can sort of um sit down with someone and it doesn't happen every time, but it happens relatively easily for me where I can sit down and just kind of feel what's going on for other people.
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As someone who sort of spends time with uh hundreds of startup founders every single year, like that's actually a pretty powerful superpower.
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Let me talk about uh what may be the next step in AI which is AI agents and you've said that you don't want to fund companies that look at AI agents as a feature.
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You want them to look at it as a core operating system.
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Explain how you think that changes what we uh think about when we talk about AI. >> Yeah, absolutely.
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I mean, we're going to get a little sci-fi here, but this is something that we're starting to see ourselves.
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um you know rebuilding the way we operate at YC.
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I think the number one thing that people get wrong is they just think that AI is just chat and then it is so much more than that.
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We now have an internal AI agent for instance named Straylight that uh kind of has a personality and then um it has a company brain like it actually has uh the total context of uh every founder we've ever backed anyone who's ever emailed us like all the applications.
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The way I think about it like from a interesting tech perspective is like a human can only keep track in their heads like seven plus or minus three things.
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And what an AI agent is is already super intelligent.
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Um it can keep you know I was explaining this to my 11-year-old.
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Uh what an AI can do is it can keep uh a stack of a thousand pages like think like three Harry Potter books.
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You know, it can needle in a haystack, any page, any fact, anything that happened in those three Harry Potter books.
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It can just know, synthesize, work with like the working memory is absolutely gigantic.
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And you know, the thing is in another year it won't be three Harry Potter books in the brain of an AI agent.
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It'll be five or it'll be 10 or it'll be 20.
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And then the set of uh things that it could operate on is even bigger.
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>> Well, wait, give me a better example.
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make this more concrete for me because data retrieval even from three howy powder books that's kind of cool but that's not I mean that's just data retrieval what makes something an agent >> I would point to um what Peter Steinberger of openclaw figured out which is if you use claude code or
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codeex um I would say right now they're so worried about sort of repeatability and safety that they actually trade off uh all of the beautiful parts of working with an AI agent which like basically can be um so similar to a human that like it sort of takes on human qualities. >> So tell me what you ask your agent to
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>> So tell me what you ask your agent to do. >> Oh gosh.
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I mean one of the things I did I uh you know it's read all of my email and all of my Dropbox.
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It's read like all of my Apple notes like you know even my therapy notes going back 20 years.
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I mean for instance like I used it for prep to be able to talk to you.
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Not to get too meta about it, but in about 15 minutes right before this talk, like it was able to uh you know download and transcribe your your top 10 podcasts you've ever done and then it actually uh diorized them.
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So you know it had an LLM go like line by line, timestamp by time stamp to pull out like major themes and um that was really helpful for me.
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but to be able to do that for like almost any thing that you do in your day-to-day life and for it to do it like somewhat more autonomously.
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And so it seems inevitable in about 2 to 3 years I would say everyone's going to do it and it's going to feel awesome.
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Like think of it as a Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder at all times.
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Like almost anything you want to do like it knows you and it's there to help and it's like quite patent.
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to help and it's like quite patent. it will actually sort of run ahead and say like what about this or like it'll help you see around corners and the reason why it's too expensive right now I mean it's just literally too expensive you know I in order to have this experience um I spend about maybe a hundred to
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$200,000 a year on tokens and so I realized that's a crazy privilege that uh not everyone can do that um you know a lot of like CEOs that I know um are doing it and they have wings >> do you think that AI, especially the agents you've been describing, will end up destroying jobs or will it end up increasing enormously the number of jobs in society? >> My hope, I mean, I don't know for
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>> My hope, I mean, I don't know for certain and, you know, I'm not clairvoyant.
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Um, but I, you know, I do believe that technology, um, is overvilified.
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I think that it does have problems and um you know AI safety is something that we need to be concerned about but the way to fix that is not to stop the technology from even happening.
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Um it is actually uh going after the abuses of people when people actually use uh or misuse the tech.
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>> But do you think it'll create jobs?
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There'll be more jobs because of AI.
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>> That's certainly my hope, right?
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Uh in the short term it may not.
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And you know that's quite frustrating.
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So some of the reason why I've been working on open source and trying to teach people how to use AI like my open source project GStack is literally uh working backwards from if I were trying to teach YC founders how to use cloud code and get 400 times the amount of output that they had before.
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Uh that was like a project that they could just drop into cloud code and get exactly the stack that I use to get that.
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use to get that. I think things like that are necessary uh in order to teach people how to use the the tools properly and um there will be people who lose their jobs uh because AI will have like sort of made that position redundant and
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then you know I think there's a big retraining issue here but you know I think something like Gstack or lots of other efforts out there could solve that right if you have that context if you were doing job X Like let's say you're a medical biller. Like you know what I
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Like you know what I want is for someone like that to maybe be able to pair up with a 22-year-old and you know they have domain expertise and someone who really really knows how to uh make 400 times the amount of software that like you you could before and you know maybe that that person who you know knows that space inside out plus someone younger or even themselves like train yourself to do it.
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I want them to be able to start a company in that space.
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And maybe it's exactly what they did before.
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Maybe it's something two clicks away.
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But either way, it requires an increase in the amount of agency.
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What we want people to do is go into their own history and their own lives.
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And it's like, what do you uniquely know? What life did you live?
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What obscure hobbies do you have?
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Like what have you seen that nobody else has seen?
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Um, and then pair that with this incredible ability like not just to code but to think, to reason.
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And so I think that's like raising the floor.
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And then on the flip side, like the ceiling is skyhigh.
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Like I think that the the responsibility for CEOs and people who have a lot of privilege is not to cost cut.
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Like that is the easy way.
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And the thing is like that is that can result in like a sort of dystopian moment where you know capital accumulates more and more wealth and uh we're not sharing it.
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>> You when you say you push back you say you push back against people who obviously who vilify AI but those who are very pessimistic about it.
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When you're looking at companies to back or fund or encourage, do you consider an ethical component whether what they're going to do is going to be driven by being good for society? >> Absolutely.
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I mean, we have so many examples at YC where uh you know, a team would come in and it was pretty clear that it was going to make a lot of money.
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Um the most uh extreme version of this I remember was um you know this was not when I was back at YC but I have to call out my partner uh Gustaf Ulstremer.
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He was head of growth at Airbnb for many years and then he became a partner here at YC and um you know a company that was focused on ADHD meds for kids came through and they applied and uh it was a remarkable set of founders but the idea was tantamount to like increasing the
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distribution of ADHD meds to a society that you know we couldn't tell if like that was a need right like um it was definitely going to make money and in the end that company did get sanctioned by the FDA and it shut down and I even believe that there were potentially criminal charges about that. I hadn't
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I hadn't checked recently but that was a bullet dodged right and I'm very proud that YC is an institution where that kind of thing can happen like we not only need to make money really we have the responsibility to fund the things and the futures that we want to live in.
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Give me an example of a couple things that would fund the future we want to live in.
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>> I mean the hard part is like it's almost anything that we actually >> I'll give you one which is have social media that instead of dividing us and enrages us helps us be stronger as a society.
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>> I think that's entirely possible and actually um this idea of personal agents is actually I think very directly a way to do it.
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Going back to Meta, right?
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Like this is a huge company that controls the algorithm.
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uh and we all wish that they didn't at some level and uh now they might not have to.
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So you could imagine uh a personal AI that you control that you program.
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You don't download the Facebook app or the Instagram app like you know that's just an API and uh you do have a social network but the social network is mediated through your own cognitive filter.
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you figure out what you want to see and then you put that in there and maybe that could even be programmed by not just you but like the people who are closest to you.
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Um I think that that's one example of like actually being able to put control of what goes in your brain back into your own hands.
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And that's something that you know before wasn't really possible.
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Like even the idea of like could a normal human being sit there and program their own algorithm that is like beneficial directly for them.
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Well, a they don't know how to program and b like what would that even look like? It's so complicated.
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Uh but when with the advent of AI agents and AI agents that can code like it'll know you.
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It'll know what your goals are.
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My year right now I I just want to focus on uh improving myself.
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I don't want to see anything about, you know, national politics.
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I might only care about local city politics. >> Yeah.
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But we've had things like that in the past.
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We've had personalized uh social media and yet the algorithms have a business model that works best when they enrage or divide us. >> Yeah.
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And the business model is uh hosted by someone else by a big tech company and then that's their control and that's their power.
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And so what personal AI is, what I hope happens is sort of more like the personal computer revolution.
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Kind of what uh Steve Jobs did in 1984.
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If you remember the original Mac commercial, you know, 1984 doesn't have to be like 1984.
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Big blue, you know, IBM does not have to win the whole thing.
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And uh I think next year will be one of the defining years where there's the next browser war.
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Um and I think it's going to be AI agent do you use?
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And you know, I think it'll go similar to operating systems.
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Like I think there will probably be a Mac, there will probably be a PC.
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>> So you're saying all these Anthropics, OpenAI, uh Gemini, it'll consolidate to just two or three.
29:55
Wouldn't that be pretty horrible?
29:58
>> I think we're already there.
29:58
And you know I think uh last year you know our friends inside some of the uh AI labs talk about uh the five kings which is actually a pretty astonishing vision where a lite cone of all future value literally like all commercial you know anything that a business would do could potentially collapse into five kings.
30:19
>> So what can you do to disrupt that?
30:22
>> I we're we're trying every day right?
30:22
So whether it's policy, whether it's directly being the funding vehicle to find uh the next generation of talent, uh to help them thrive, to make sure that the markets are open for them, um to make sure that there's open source to, you know, find I mean what what I want is there to be Linux, right, for personal AI, >> basically an open-source operating system. >> Yeah.
30:47
And it just has to be easy enough to use and cheap enough to use that um everyone chooses it.
30:51
And I think that's possible.
30:54
>> Do you think we should have regulation then that pushes in that direction or is that an impossible dream?
31:01
>> I wouldn't say anything is impossible, right?
31:03
And uh you know, I think that that might actually be a preferable outcome to some of the other things that uh some of the politicians are putting out there.
31:10
you know, Bernie Sanders wants to sort of seize assets and speaking as an immigrant and children of immigrants who came to America um to flee asset seizure that you know we want prosperity, we want the ability for people to start new businesses to proceed and continue and that's one of the defining traits of America.
31:30
>> But so what would smart regulation look like?
31:32
I think it basically just looks like open app markets act like being able to create an app that um actually operates on your iMss for instance like AI can't touch your iMes and what Apple says is like we're the only ones who could possibly be safe enough for you and I think that that's just not actually true.
31:51
We shouldn't allow them to say that like nobody else could possibly do this and that's just a smoke screen for a their own market power and making money through their own modes.
31:59
making money through their own modes. Um but also B like it actually just uh it kills markets and you know the next Apple can't emerge right if Google Apple and all the trillion dollar companies don't uh open a lane and create markets we will live in a world where there aren't startups that's like a bit of a nightmare scenario for me like I think that this is the counterwe against uh
32:25
tyranny and frankly mismanagement in big tech like you need to have alternatives um and so to to the extent that the government can create regulation that makes sure that these markets are open at the extreme like I would even say you know looking at how open source models are progressing now we are just handing Chinese model companies um you know a massive advantage there's zero open-source AI companies in the United
32:53
States um and it doesn't have to be that way like there probably regulations that could allow uh distillation which is the exact advantage that Chinese companies have um for American and European companies and you know we
33:08
can have a vibrant ecosystem you know some of these things being too big like I think that's real and that's correct and you know if you go all the way back to brandise and trust busting right like we live in a better world when there
33:21
isn't concentration in markets and that there isn't self-preferencing um and I think that that is more true than ever when it comes to tech and startups Well, in some ways, you're really going back when you talk about Lewis Brandeise and you talk about the railway companies, you're really saying that we've been through this before, which is the 1890s, an explosion of technologies even greater than we have today. And then you create uh these
33:45
And then you create uh these great robber barons that control it.
33:48
And then you have a period whether it be Teddy Roosevelt or Lewis Brandeise that take on uh Standard Oil or take on the railways and say you got to open up.
33:59
You got to allow everybody else to ride your rails.
34:04
You think we could just say hey let's learn from history and apply it now. >> I think so.
34:09
I think we have to learn from history in two different ways.
34:11
I mean, I think when you look at the Sanders and AOC end of things or in San Francisco, Syikot Traardi or even what Tom Styer was saying in his failed bid for governor in California, I think you're starting to see uh a thing that is to me like fundamentally unamerican.
34:28
>> Well, wait, let me ask you, what are you more worried about?
34:31
that a populists on the left are going to have some socialist system or that we are going to have a technology that gets too controlled by too few people and is not democratizing and it doesn't incent startups.
34:48
>> I mean honestly both scenarios are terrible and I would stand against both of those scenarios and I think that there has to be a middle way.
34:54
I think that we should follow American history and you know how do we create markets?
35:01
How do we not make it illegal to uh create prosperity and wealth? I don't begrudge Google.
35:06
I think there are people on the hard left for instance that would say like Google should not exist and we want more Googles. We actually want more.
35:14
You know, OpenAI was a spinout of Y Combinator.
35:16
Sam Alman sat in my seat and said, you know, he he got to see the front row of all the builders, all the young people with crazy ideas.
35:26
and uh he and Ilia Suskver and um Greg Brockman, they sat in a room and created YC Research that became Open AI with Elon and now we live on their timeline.
35:39
Right now we live on um an accelerated timeline where the age of intelligence is much closer and so I don't think that's a bad thing.
35:49
that's a bad thing. But you know AOC and a great many Americans today uh it's unconscionably believe that all billionaires are ill begotten and when people say that billionaires shouldn't exist they're also saying that society
36:03
should oify that LLM should not exist it also is saying that things like Google that you know organize the world's information that shouldn't exist and uh to that I say like I you know I disagree you know like we should have more billionaires we want more choice we want more prosperity. We want more jobs. We want more jobs. There is a middle way.
36:22
It doesn't have to be big tech oligarchy, but it also doesn't have to be mass asset seizure.
36:30
Like, I think there's a middle American way, and that's what we [music] very much will fight for and hope for.
36:36
>> Gary Tan, thank you so much for being part of the builders.
36:40
>> Thank you so much for [music] having me.