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What does success look like for you when you leave your hill visit this week?
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We believe that little tech cannon should exist and you're done right little tech will actually go on to create some of the best companies out there and we don't want one or two or five of them.
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We want thousands of them and that type of prosperity is the thing that solves American problems.
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And the wild thing to realize was you every senator or congressperson I talked to would say, "How come you know you start up founders like you don't why don't you come through? Like what's going on?
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Like we see lots of other people who talk talk about tech but you know no little tech."
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And then that's sort of what I realized. Yeah.
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We actually do need to show up because what we really at Y Combinator what we really desperately care about actually is open markets and the ability for a few people with an idea to come out and say, "You know what? I understand technology.
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I have a special insight about customer and I can actually go and create something of great value."
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And it'll look really small initially but you know at the end of the day it might end up touching a billion people. Hey everyone.
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If you're wondering why we're in monkey suits today we are in Washington D. C.
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the seat of the American government. Why are we here Luther?
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Well, I'm so excited that you're here Gary. It's because YC is in D. C.
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now and we are advocating for founders and making sure that founders have a seat at the table.
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Washington for so long has just been guided by the interest of some of the largest players particularly in the technology sector and so, we're trying to really fill that vacuum and make sure that the authentic voices of founders um get heard by our policy makers.
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So, for those of you who haven't met Luther yet, uh he's the new head of public policy for Y Combinator, and he spent many years uh both in DC and tech policy, uh most recently for Yelp, which is how I met you first.
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Like, you know, I I think it was a couple years ago, and you were uh one of the first people that take me down the uh the hallways of power, as it were.
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I'll never forget going to the White House with you and sitting in a meeting with Tim Wu, and hearing for the first time the term little tech.
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And I thought we that always uh registered with me.
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I think that that's a great way to think about it, cuz it's not like we want everybody to be little forever.
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It's It's really But it It's It teases up a nice dichotomy of what we're really talking about in terms of who has a voice in Washington.
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And And thus far, you know, little tech really has not been present, and it's really by little tech we mean kind of this emergent tech in the the tech with the most potential to uh you know, make people's lives better.
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What are some of the things that we're fighting for?
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The biggest one probably is, you know, access to talent.
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Making sure that high-skilled uh individuals can actually get into our country and build build companies.
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And that is depressingly uh not as easy and straightforward as it should be, as many in our audience know.
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Another theme on access to talent is related to sort of non-competes.
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Like, where there was recently a rule that the FTC uh put out doing a blanket ban on national ban on non-competes.
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It's working through the courts.
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There's some in the Congress that think that should be led by Congress.
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I'm kind of indifferent to who leads it.
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I think we uh need a national non-competes ban.
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In California, there's a de facto ban, and I think that's unlocked a lot of great innovation.
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Connected to non-compete ban and gets into sort of the next high-level thing is sort of access to markets.
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How do we make sure that the emergent technology is able to build without fear of facing a choke point or some arbitrary self-preferencing that ensures that consumers aren't able to see this innovation.
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And so um promoting legislation like the American Innovation and Choice Online Act or the Open Apps Market Act, these legislation that would effectively make it a lot tougher if you were one of the biggest companies, biggest internet platforms in the world to egregiously self-preference.
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Like if you have a, you know, a monopoly business like search or um you know smartphones or whatever good for you, but you can't then parlay that dominance into these like downstream markets in a way that snuffs out competition. And then finally AI.
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I mean that's like what everybody's talking about not just in San Francisco, but in DC and ensuring that we don't inadvertently create conditions that squelch entrepreneurship in that.
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So ensuring for example that open source tools and open source foundation models are safe from just getting criminalized. Yeah. Legalize math. Legalize math.
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And then one of the crazier things that I think both of us I certainly discovered coming to DC with you a couple years ago, but probably dawned on you fairly quickly was that you know, there are a lot of people who talk about tech.
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There are a lot of people who have big stakes in what the government does having to do with tech, but those things are sort of separate from what might actually be great for the people or even great for startups and little tech.
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One of the reasons that people get so fed up with Washington is that it's just overrun with special interest.
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And there's actually a great book out right now I'm reading called The Wolves of K Street, which is all about the history of the lobbying industry and just how it didn't used to be this way.
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It used to be really just like consumer advocates and citizens.
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But the idea is that when it comes to technology, it seems like the last 15 years at least have been dominated by only a handful of players.
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They're the ones who really have a seat at the table.
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They're the ones who get invited to the White House state dinners.
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They're the ones that are driving a lot of the policy.
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Sometimes that's fine for startups if on issues for example like high-skilled immigration, you know, we're pretty aligned with a take a Microsoft as an example in terms of we want more high-skilled immigrants in this country.
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But sometimes you're not going to necessarily agree on all these issues and so that's why it's important to have an authentic voice.
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There's a perception from certainly the outside of DC that like, you know, is this how much of it is driven by money and then there's this term astroturf?
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In your experience, like what is the thing that overcomes astroturf?
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Well, astroturf is basically when you have a special interest or maybe a a pool of companies or maybe a single large company that they want to kill a bill that would maybe reform their industry or they want to get something passed that would give them
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some kind of special permission to do something and they know that like it would not fly if it were sort of up for a democratic vote and everybody were like highly informed about what was going on and so they essentially prop up you know, fake advocacy. They gin up
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They gin up letters or they just kind of do people they around the issue and drive people to um to write in but astroturf really just is it is kind of like the opposite of grassroots.
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It's it's this it's it's fake.
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It's it's it's creating a perception that people care about something when really it's just this like um you know, invisible often invisible interest that's that's really pushing the issue.
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And so because Washington is so overrun with AstroTurf, it really like pours gasoline on an already kind of cynical partisan system.
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However, the antidote to that is authentic stories.
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And because Y Combinator has 11,000 founders that, you know, presumably touch virtually all congressional districts, there are so many incredible stories um in our community that being able to to directly interface and and tell those stories with uh members of Congress, with folks at the White House, with
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agencies, that is actually what I think gets us to sensible policy making is because they finally have a resource where they can uh you know, get some education about like how is this actually going to affect like the the, you know, small three-person team that's building something. I think the most interesting history
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I think the most interesting history that I think is a little bit even forgotten both the tech people and people in DC is that 15, 20 years ago tech was like sort of this thing that happened in California.
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It was like a fringe thing.
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Like the max market caps on a lot of these companies was like, you know, $50 billion, $100 like the the largest you would get.
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And today, you know, the S&P 500 is, you know, half companies worth a trillion dollars or more. Right. And by market value.
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So, you know, basically over the past 10 to 15 years tech went from a very fringe thing to now big tech.
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And so when you come to DC, like they're almost like, "What's this?"
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Like you, you know, they'd heard of Y Combinator.
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Like maybe their their kids or their aids had like applied to YC or had gone through it before.
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Like that's sort of the extent of it and so that's why I felt like little tech was sort of the perfect um counter positioning to big tech because uh I am I mean in a lot of conversations fairly surprised at the amount of ire that big tech has uh you know, sort of gained. Data thing. Definitely.
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Yeah, I mean it we definitely even even though big tech is has sort of a head start in this conversation has really been playing the game for 15 years plus.
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There still remains sort of bridges that need to be built between Silicon Valley and Washington because frankly a lot of the um you know, a lot of the people who are our leaders are not you get you get ranked the longer you stay.
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You know, I think a lot of the younger staff get these technology issues more than people would appreciate.
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I think people often point to this exchange between Senator Orrin Hatch and Mark Zuckerberg where he says How do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service? Senator, we run ads. I would bet a kidney.
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I'm almost positive that that was like a staged kind of tongue-in-cheek moment that a lot but I think people outside DC don't understand that some of this stuff is actually choreographed behind the scenes.
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I'm not saying it's not totally untrue that there definitely situations where senators themselves don't understand the issues.
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The internet is a series of tubes.
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Yeah, that's a great example.
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But it it the the staff especially the younger staff are surprisingly sophisticated.
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But if we don't show up and we're not having those conversations and forming those relationships, then it becomes a the only folks that they hear from are representing through the the largest most powerful interests and sometimes they don't those don't align with like the little tech folks.
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Well, if there's anything I've learned, uh it's a very different thing to read something on X versus uh meet someone in person, shake their hand, and have a real honest-to-god conversation.
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And um that's what we're here to do.
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So, we'll see you guys next time.