0:00
I don't think people are prepared or even aware of what's about to happen right now.
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0:04
And it's like super super good news for anyone who's running a business.
0:18
Sam, have you seen I feel like there's a new meme that got birth and I think Gary's involved with it now, which is the learn to cook loser. Have you seen this Sam? What is that? What is that?
0:27
Gary, can you explain this one? I posted it.
0:28
I don't even know like what it was a reply to but it seems to be going viral. So it's a good meme.
0:33
I think somebody Paul Graham was talking about cooking.
0:37
He was like giving his kid advice and he's like, you know, when you have a girlfriend or something like that like you know, they love to come home to the smell of like a meal being cooked.
0:43
And then someone immediately you know, random Twitter troll is like why you raising like a feminine man like you know, he should be masculine doesn't need to learn to cook.
0:52
And then I think Paul's reply was learn to cook comma loser.
0:57
And then all the builders like I'm John and others basically like tech people were like, you know, this is actually good general advice like learn to cook as a high agency way of living.
1:08
I think it's like the compressed idea of you know, build things actually make things actually go do things in the world that totally you know, are of value.
1:16
Maybe I'm reading too much into it.
1:18
It's a more succinct version of make something people want.
1:22
Yeah, it's the punched up version. Learn to cook loser.
1:24
Is is Paul Graham like the definition of success basically built like one of the greatest companies of all time YC and then it started working well and then just bails to Europe where he's living in a I don't actually know if this is true but it appears he's living in the woods writing and being with his family.
1:42
And I'm like, is this guy did he just did he just pull pull the ultimate move and it worked out perfectly? I think so. I think he really did.
1:53
What's what's your version of that?
1:53
I mean, more or less like YC as a concept is like kind of a miracle.
2:00
It's you know, there are very very few um places in the world where anything like YC ever happens and then I just feel like I need to be like the watcher on the wall.
2:10
It's like okay, let's this thing is working.
2:14
And then it's working for relatively mysterious reasons that are almost too obvious.
2:18
I mean, it's at once a mystery and it's obvious.
2:23
YC itself is like pretty earnest.
2:23
Like it's just make something people want apply in this thing will try to go through and sincerely find the things we think could be really really big and then we just give you a bunch of money and throw you in a room with all the other people who are you know, sort of the top 1% of people trying to do that thing.
2:40
And then somehow some magic happens where you know, 5 to 10% of those companies become worth a billion dollars or more.
2:47
And um you know, YC takes some equity but not that much, you know, like 7% specifically for people who often wouldn't have access to that capital or that network like by default anywhere anywhere else.
3:00
I mean so it's kind of cool.
3:02
It's just you know, 1 + 1 = 3 in a really unusual way.
3:06
Um sort of resembles a college in some ways.
3:12
You know, only instead of people paying tuition like we pay them.
3:16
You know, when I think of good brands a lot of people will just think of like like funny or cool things.
3:21
But when you think of like what BlackRock or Goldman like some of these names are kind of like yeah or or Harvard they're like they're a little communist and like a little scary but they're institutions.
3:31
Do you ever purposely think how do we become an institution or is this just all because of you just said let's have high standards like was it on purpose or did it just happen because you had good values? How does that happen?
3:42
I mean, I think a lot of it comes back to you earlier we were talking about Paul Graham and um the guy's just a very unusual original thinker and very just clear communicator and then I think the thing I learned from him in particular is that clear communication and you know, just using basic logic being able to explain you sort of you know, A to B to C and then you zoom out and there's a really big idea in there.
4:11
That's you know, in essence what a really good pitch is.
4:13
Um you know I think that that's where it came from.
4:19
Like Paul was just very you know, both frankly Paul and Jessica Livingston his wife and co-founder the two of them basically created this thing that feels different didn't feel like another investor felt very welcoming.
4:32
felt very welcoming. I mean the sort of uh viral tweet I think PG has about Jessica is like you know, Jessica once cut a founder's fingernails before he went on stage at demo day or something just because it's it's like sort of you know, at once very exacting you know, we have very
4:51
high standards but then it's at once also very um sort of like almost family or like homie just um welcoming and you know, sort of that mix of both very earnest and very formidable like those two things combined created I don't know something that seems to create magic. Isn't it wild by the way? Like just
5:12
Isn't it wild by the way?
5:12
Like just think about this.
5:14
So I one of my companies I recently taken through like an M&A process and I talked to bankers and bankers so we we you go first and interview bankers like why should I go with you?
5:23
Why should I give you 4% of this transaction for 6 months of work here at the very end.
5:28
And they're all about their differentiated process how they do more more more how they have the smartest people in the room and all the things they brag about about what makes them successful on paper makes sense but it's kind of the midwit meme because if you look at YC it's like yeah, we we invest in people before they even have an idea a lot of the time.
5:49
They have no no traction.
5:51
Often they have to change ideas.
5:51
We don't negotiate every deal.
5:52
We just 7% for every single company. Same deal. That's it.
5:57
The application yeah, it's like a one-page form you fill out online. The all the interview?
6:00
Yeah, we talk to you for 10 minutes and we just give you a thumbs up thumbs down from there.
6:04
All of the things YC does are so simple. Yeah, it's 10 minutes. Oh my god. 10 minute interview.
6:09
And they're picking winners at a higher rate than anybody else.
6:13
I think the you know, they're attracting winners at a higher rate than anybody so it makes it easier to pick but they're picking winners at a higher rate than any other investor even though their process is simpler and less than what you would think you need in order to be you know, the the number one player in the space.
6:29
And they basically I think I've read the stat. It's pretty insane.
6:32
You guys basically every time you run a batch you basically print $3 billion of market cap on average.
6:38
I did some math and I looked at the the batch values.
6:40
So you know, like something like 5% of all the companies become unicorns but you and you just do that a couple times a year.
6:47
You you're doing it twice a year now you're doing it four times a year.
6:50
You're like oh yeah, let's just print $3 billion of market cap two four two to four times a year. That is mind-blowing. Like that is so insane.
6:59
Yeah, I mean I I think the the craziest thing I'd ever heard was basically the Airbnb round where I think something like under $20,000 became $2 billion.
7:10
And the liquid IPO when Airbnb IPO'd.
7:14
So and you know, YC didn't even take the pro rata then.
7:15
So it's pretty wild honestly like you know, easily could have returned 5 to 7 billion dollars with a good portfolio management strategy but you know, I that's the thing I think uh simple things work actually.
7:31
It's uh If YC was a company cuz I think it's been around like 18 years you said so in the the last 18 years you know YC's got to be up there in like the top 10 Silicon Valley companies things that got created that created so much value.
7:45
Um do you think about it that way or is there do you ever think That's what I try and get people to understand like this isn't just you know working at a company.
7:53
This is uh you know, I think we did the math on um how much money per employee YC in theory should drive and uh I think we're something like 20-ish million dollars per year per employee in terms of like you know, sort of market cap value created in the world.
8:13
And that's just the carry like that's our take like you know, in terms of value created for our limited partners and you know, sort of overall in in sort of I think it's like close to a hundred million per year per employee. So it's pretty wild. Who are the LPs even?
8:28
Is it like the pension fund types or just like a VC fund people who invest in VC.
8:32
I mean, the wild thing about YC is I think we're going to release a white paper on this pretty soon but I haven't talked about this publicly before.
8:40
Um we looked at a two-year period from 2018 to 2020 of people who invested in at least three YC companies per batch for those two years.
8:53
The top top decile predictably was very good. It was like 16x.
8:56
Uh the top quartile was also very good. It was 8x.
9:02
Uh I mean, these are outrageous returns for a such a short period of time in venture period.
9:08
The wild thing though is median was 5x and then the bottom quartile was 3. 3x.
9:13
So it's really crazy because in venture period if you look at how VCs make money it's all in the power law.
9:19
There's only you know, sort of the top 25% make any money at all and then the top quartile generally for any given year of VC uh is only 3x.
9:33
So it's pretty wild what's happening.
9:36
You've read I think I said read something you've read 6,000 YC applications.
9:39
So you've seen more of this than anybody else.
9:43
You're the admissions officer.
9:43
You've been in a lot of these interviews.
9:46
You've then seen the companies grow.
9:49
What do the extreme winners look like early on and do they look any different than the average company?
9:53
I mean honestly they're very similar Like my two craziest wins one was Brian Armstrong at Coinbase and he was a solo software engineer working at, you know, anti-fraud at Airbnb.
10:11
And you know, he had never started a company before.
10:14
He, you know, a lot of the things we worked on with him very early were like sort of the basics that, you know, it's sort of hard to believe now on the other side of him having built Coinbase.
10:22
It's kind of hard to believe that, you know, there was a time when Brian Armstrong didn't know how to, you know, do a product launch or you know, even raise a single dime from investors.
10:36
So, I think it's basically been that same profile.
10:38
Like highly technical people who are just like sort of smart and earnest and that's about it.
10:44
Like that's sort of mainly who we like to fund.
10:47
And then it's I think unusually really, really important today in 2024.
10:53
I mean, large language models have basically opened everything up.
10:57
I mean, almost anything that a knowledge worker can do, you know, anyone with 130 IQ or below, pretty sure that with workflow and evals, you could write software now that could do what that, you know, basically almost any knowledge worker could do and you could do it perfectly with like no management headaches.
11:18
It's I think like really profound moment for all entrepreneurs period.
11:26
Hey, let's take a quick break to talk about AI.
11:27
We all know AI, big deal.
11:27
You see demos all the time of people doing really cool things, but as a business owner, sometimes it's hard to figure out how do I actually use this? What do I actually do?
11:36
I've been trying to use it across all my businesses, you know, things like making little prototype websites without needing to hire a coder or writing copy for our website.
11:43
Or I give it a bunch of data and I ask it to analyze it for me.
11:47
It's been kind of amazing, but the thing I always need is inspiration.
11:51
I know the tool can do a lot, but it can almost do so much that I'm not really sure what I should actually be doing with it.
11:56
And so, that's why I think it's great that HubSpot has created a report where they surveyed 2,000 global marketing leaders and asked them, "What's separating the high growth and low growth businesses and what strategies they're using with AI in their business?"
12:09
You can grab these strategies and apply them to your own business for free.
12:12
The link is in the description below.
12:16
Yeah, I think me and Sam have both had learn to code on our to-do list for like 12 years.
12:20
Bought the bought the, you know, Python the hard way course on Udemy, did all that I think we now we get to skip the learn to. It's just code now.
12:28
You don't you don't have to do the learn to part.
12:33
You don't need to actually write it.
12:33
You don't need to actually write it. I mean, it helps to be able to write a little bit yourself, but yeah, I mean, the wild thing from here is with like the new developments in 01 and code gen, I actually think it'll be more important that you're able to speak
12:47
to virtual developers and like instruct them on exactly what you want and all the different use cases and like we're right at that moment where it's going from like you really have to code it all yourself to you can just sort of talk to this pretty smart entity that will, you know, do it mostly for you. Like it's not even about
13:05
Like it's not even about no code anymore.
13:07
I was doing that the other day where I was talking to chat GPT where I was like explaining like, "Here's the problems my business is having.
13:13
Can you help me like Can you just like be a therapist with me and help me like come up with interesting solutions?"
13:18
And the answers were shockingly good.
13:20
By the way, it was like it was like pretty good at just like brainstorming with me, just being like a sparring partner.
13:25
Is there a you know, like I know that YC a lot of it comes down to making people what people want and and things like this.
13:32
And to me that's a that's like a bit of an art where you you're you're more of an artist than a scientist.
13:38
But is there a world where you could take your 6,000 applications and a bunch of other data that you have and kind of spreadsheet your way to like the likelihood that we build a company that And I think there's magic to create these like multi deca unicorns whatever.
13:52
But is there a way we could like use your data and spreadsheet your way to like, "Well, here's the interesting opportunity.
13:56
This is going to get to some type of traction and wealth creation with a high rate of certainty?"
14:02
I, you know, some of it is like we think someone might do something like that and it might totally work actually.
14:05
And then the trickiest thing is like how do you actually get really smart people to come and do that thing?
14:11
And you know, I mean, capital as a service has been an I think like Chamath talked about that and I thought it was very interesting. It sounds conceivable.
14:21
I mean, I think they experimented with this when he was still working on Social Capital where instead of having a 10-minute interview and you know, how it works at YC is we actually have 14 equal group partners including myself.
14:35
So, we actually, you know, hand read these applications and you know, you're not talking to an AI when you do the 10-minute interview.
14:42
It's literally just talking with us.
14:44
And then once we fund you, we're just working with people day to day, you know, for those 10, 12 weeks and then onwards into the future of the company.
14:51
Like we own, you know, 7% of the company.
14:53
We're like a big seed investors.
14:55
So, we need to sort of be around and it's very like high touch and you get like an individual person.
14:59
And then I think like the capital as a service idea like is really just, you know, connect your metrics, connect your Stripe account, your bank account, your QuickBooks.
15:13
You know, I mean, it's actually pretty doable today.
15:15
Like it's conceivable that someone should connect all those things up and then an LLM can just, you know, rank whether something's real or not, do the due diligence.
15:23
And then if you like hit a certain bar, like boom, like here's money in your bank account.
15:29
Sam, did you ever see that when they did that for growth stage companies?
15:32
I think they called it the eight ball.
15:33
It was like you you connect all your data and then it'll it'll it'll just tell you they like they could just take your raw data and they could put it into a format where they needed to analyze it, but then secondly, they benchmarked you.
15:42
So, they're like, "Oh, wow, they have best in class retention for this category or they're below average, so don't invest." Right?
15:49
But but I thought the results were like interesting, but not like like as early.
15:53
Yeah, where it's like this is interesting.
15:55
But do you remember when chat GPT started getting popular?
15:56
I think shot two years ago and there was a guy on Twitter who had a really funny like name.
16:02
It was like green point or something like that.
16:03
And he told chat GPT like, "Make me a a content website that can rank high on search and it can monetize on ads."
16:10
And I think within like three months he got it to like $20,000 in in monthly revenue.
16:14
Do you remember that story? Oh, yeah.
16:18
Like the normal way now is I prompt AI and I want AI to be an agent.
16:21
What he did was the opposite.
16:23
He's like, "You tell me what to do.
16:24
I'll be your human agent.
16:26
You you have the good ideas. You prompt me."
16:28
And I thought that was like kind of the brilliant part.
16:30
work extra well now with 01, like the new reasoning model.
16:33
Gary, can I ask you a question?
16:35
You today you probably think about like, you know, the future and billion dollar ideas, but when you were 14, I read that you kind of had your own hustle there.
16:44
You were cold calling companies in the yellow pages trying to get work and you you made enough money to kind of actually help your family out, like move from an apartment to a house. Can you tell that story?
16:52
I've never heard that before. Yeah, of course. Um, I mean, let's see.
16:55
I mean, my parents we grew up you know, sometimes food insecure.
16:58
My dad was a foreman in a machine shop and my mom was a home health aide and certified nursing assistant at convalescent homes. She worked two jobs.
17:10
And me and my brother lived in, you know, apartments in Fremont in the Bay Area, sort of in the shadow of Silicon Valley.
17:17
And I guess one of the weirder things is like my dad's actually an engineer, but he just didn't have the EQ to really hold on to jobs and he also struggled with alcoholism.
17:24
So, we just he was always losing his job.
17:27
And so, we were always just like never had money around.
17:31
And the thing was like he really did invest in computers.
17:34
Like we had our first computer was a, you know, IBM PC XT.
17:40
So, you know, we were sort of reality poor, but, you know, rich in access to computers, which was like really, really powerful for me.
17:49
And I just realized, "Oh, yeah, like I'm 14, but I you know, know how to make web pages."
17:56
And I started winning some awards for like web design as a kid in junior high.
18:01
I started an underground newspaper with my um uh junior high friends and we learned how to make a website for that underground newspaper and we got and we called it an online zine.
18:13
And the funniest thing was like we had, you know, thousands of people would find it off of Usenet newsgroups and things and we'd write articles that, you know, I I don't think people knew that we were 14.
18:26
Like when when you're on the internet, one thing we learned is like nobody knows that you're a dog, I guess. I don't know.
18:32
Like people would just write letters to the editor like we were like a legitimate publication and I just got sort of really addicted to that.
18:38
Like like like an early vice. com. Yeah, basically.
18:43
Like I think we wrote you know, my my buddy wrote editorial about, you know, how the three strikes law was bad for California.
18:50
And you know, we're like 12 years old.
18:51
Like what do we know about any of that stuff?
18:53
But you know, on the internet nobody can tell and you know, I think we wrote it in pretty clear English.
18:59
Like people couldn't tell that we were that young.
19:02
And then I I feel like I got really addicted to the internet.
19:03
And then I thought, "Well, maybe I can make money."
19:07
And you know, back then there was a thing called the yellow pages that they throw on your doorstep and that's how you would find businesses.
19:13
And I thought, "Okay, the yellow page is probably my link to making money somehow."
19:19
Like if they have a business and they have a little ad in the yellow pages, literally in the print section.
19:24
Like, you know, and this was not so early that like the internet had eaten yellow pages yet, but it was late enough that there was an internet section.
19:34
So, I just started cold calling, you know, seeing, "Hey, like I know how to make web pages. Will anyone hire me?"
19:40
And sure enough, I ended up getting a job and riding my bike to the local web design firm that made city websites for like City of Pleasanton and Fremont and San Jose.
19:50
And uh know, basically they paid me you know, 10 bucks a 7 bucks and 10 bucks an hour to work on I mean, I learned how to do graphic design. I learned HTML.
19:59
What is that uh what's that phone script? Oh god.
20:02
Yeah, first you have to deepen your voice, right?
20:06
You can't be you can't be 14 on the call. That's right.
20:07
And it's like oh, I'm I'm a web I'm an award-winning web designer and you know, but I'm 14. So but did you say that? Yeah, I think so. I mean, um it's funny.
20:17
I mean, I remember my first boss, he was this was sort of his like side hustle.
20:25
So by the way, is award-winning designer in your LinkedIn now?
20:27
Yeah, you got to put that in there. That's a miss. That's a miss. That's a miss. That's a miss. That's a miss. It's funny.
20:34
I mean, I remember it was like this company called Infolane.
20:38
It was you know, they had a one like basically I think it had a conference room and you know, sort of an engineer den and a lot and like a little reception desk and that was the whole office.
20:49
And I think it was one really technical like sort of neckbeard Unix guy.
20:53
And then the funny thing was the CEO was also a bank a regional bank manager, I think at Fremont Bank.
21:02
And so you know, the tech guy had walked into the local Fremont Bank and you know, the internet was happening and this bank manager was like, I'm going to give I'm going to invest myself.
21:13
Like I'm going to invest my own money.
21:16
And he became like the co-founder on this you know, web design firm in 1993 94.
21:20
So it was pretty wild to to think about.
21:25
I mean, that's just how you started business and that was what business was.
21:28
Like you didn't go on the internet and apply on a form or something.
21:32
You literally walked into a bank and banks were supposed to loan you money to start companies which you know, I think to some extent still happens, but you know, it's just funny to think like how that's evolved since.
21:43
And at some point did you just make enough where you were like, mom, dad, here like I can help or what happened?
21:48
Yeah, I mean, we I always lived in apartments growing up and I had a little brother who was 8 years younger and you know, I wanted us to live in I wanted the American dream.
22:00
And so um you know, I still remember like helping cook the turkey at Thanksgiving and you know, the new house that you know, our family bought and you know, I helped my parents with the down payment and my parents still live in that home in Fremont.
22:16
So I'm I'm helping them remodel it right now. That's amazing.
22:20
By the way, I I looked up your old blog.
22:22
I think back in 2001 you you wrote the following which I think is pretty accurate.
22:26
You said, you know, blogs are all over the place. This is back in 2001. So over 20 years ago.
22:33
Pretty soon we'll all just be writing a blog.
22:35
We won't really talk to friends after catch up anymore.
22:36
Human interaction will just boil down to clicking on someone's name on your favorite website and that'll be it.
22:41
No more tedious how do you do over a nice matcha Frappuccino at some pretentious cafe.
22:47
Just read my blog if you want to know what's up. Oh my god.
22:49
You have predicted social media.
22:51
It wasn't exactly blogging, but you that's Instagram stories. That's Facebook. That's the newsfeed. Exactly.
22:57
I think you nailed it for better and for worse. That's funny.
23:02
Man, I wish the one thing I wish I could do is like go back in time and tell myself don't sell your time.
23:07
Like don't work for a consulting firm or like you know, get paid $10 an hour. Like go make products.
23:16
But did you did you ever do that?
23:16
I thought you were pretty young when you first started getting involved with YC. Oh, I was 27.
23:22
So I was much later, honestly.
23:25
I mean, my journey You look very young in the photos.
23:26
You actually didn't need to come from the future because I think I've heard a story that you were working somewhere Microsoft or something like that.
23:34
And Peter Thiel was Peter Thiel was like, hey, quit your job.
23:39
In fact, I'll pay you your whole salary to quit your job and come co-found this new company this little company we got called Palantir.
23:44
Yeah, it's like a 95 billion dollar market cap company today. And you turned him down.
23:50
Could you I mean, what the hell were you thinking?
23:53
Can you just embarrass yourself here? Of course.
23:55
I mean, I you know, I went to Stanford computer engineering.
24:00
I mean, changed my life obviously.
24:01
Fraternity brothers of mine, Joe Joe Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen.
24:06
Stephen and I went to high school together, grew up together, tried to start a bunch of companies together.
24:13
You know, I was a year out of school.
24:15
You know, it was 2004 and I thought like, oh, look at me. I have health insurance. I have a real job.
24:19
And then my old fraternity brothers who were a couple years behind me at Stanford like I guess they couldn't get a real job.
24:26
So they're going to you know, go start a company. I don't know.
24:29
It's really funny to think about in retrospect.
24:32
But you know, one of the things that was always really smart about the Peter Thiel world is when you start something, you always just need the smartest people around you and I was lucky enough that I made you know, Joe and Stephen's list when that happened.
24:47
And you know, Peter was just running the playbook that worked for him when he sold PayPal which is and this is something that people at Palantir do all the time now.
24:56
It's like when you start a thing, you you know, take a 8 and 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper and you write down all the smartest people you know and then you go take them out to dinner and lunch and just you know, sit on their doorstep until they quit their jobs to come join you.
25:09
And you know, I guess it was pretty wild.
25:12
I mean, Peter was not a billionaire yet.
25:13
I think like the funniest thing about PayPal and the PayPal Mafia is that like they basically fought a land war in Asia against eBay.
25:21
You know, I mean, when you don't have when you have to work on other people's distribution and other people's platforms, you just end up becoming like the most vicious hardcore you know, builder fighter types to just like gut it out to build a business on someone else's platform.
25:36
And then the exit for PayPal was just not big enough that it made people it made people like able to take lots of risk, but not so much that they had lost all energy and will to fight.
25:50
Well, and there was a bunch and there was a bunch of them too.
25:52
So that got divided up a bunch. Yeah, it's wild.
25:55
How much was Peter Thiel worth do you think at that conversation?
25:57
Because like let's say you made $80,000.
26:02
That's like a big deal, right?
26:02
To be out to dinner with somebody like, I'll give you 80 grand right now just to quit. Yeah, totally.
26:06
To get a co-founder or co-founding engineer like I I I some of it is like I could see myself doing that today.
26:12
I mean, I think Peter was probably worth like at least a couple hundred or at least a hundred million at that moment.
26:18
More than enough to to be able to say something like outlandish like that.
26:22
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a fair trade today.
26:24
Like I would definitely trade like my you know, my gold Rolex for a first co-founding engineer of a company that I think could be worth a hundred billion dollars in the future. That is a fair trade.
26:37
Did he make a compelling pitch like about the company or was he just like, I don't know. This is just like a bet.
26:42
Like was he did he see the future in that that sense of like what it became? Yeah, absolutely.
26:46
I mean, I think the thing I really learned from that moment. I mean, I was 22.
26:50
I didn't know how the world worked at all.
26:52
I mean, we had dinner at his French restaurant Frizone.
26:56
I think that's one of the things you do when you you know, make it to centimillionaires.
27:00
You do something stupid like open a restaurant.
27:03
And I mean, the restaurant was terrible.
27:06
Like the seafood was really bad and I mean, he lost like millions of dollars on that restaurant, right? I think so.
27:11
I mean, today it's this really nice steakhouse, but yeah, it was bad.
27:17
And then you know, what I should have done.
27:18
I mean, I was so lacking in social graces.
27:20
You know, they did the whole pitch and then I think I said no like before the soup came out even.
27:25
And so we were just like awkwardly sitting there for the rest of the dinner.
27:32
And he had actually he was like, here. Like here's a check. Like $70,000.
27:35
You know, how much a year do you make at Microsoft? Here's $70,000. Cash this check.
27:42
I didn't really understand it in the moment and then I think in retrospect like sort of the the number one thing that I didn't understand that I do now sort of realize like I have to tell you know, tell everyone this is how it works is you know, I didn't join at the time because I thought that the world was sort of told to you or like you know, sort of narrated to you, I guess.
28:05
You know, I I thought oh, the Wall Street Journal isn't writing about enterprise software. This isn't a hot space.
28:11
And so you know, that that was like fundamentally the backward way of thinking.
28:16
Like the world doesn't like happen to you.
28:19
If you are actually a like prime mover in the world like Peter Thiel or my friends, you go out and you go into the world and you discover something about the world.
28:32
Like you actually talk to people.
28:32
Like you actually talk to your users.
28:33
And you sort of gather primary first source information on how the world works.
28:38
And what they had done was realized that the world's biggest companies and the world's biggest governments had no access to software engineers or you know, big data back then people said like big data or data mining was like you know, today we say AI, but either way these were just buzzwords for concepts that are like actually pretty real.
29:01
Like I think they you know, went into the security apparatus of like the three-letter agencies in DC and realized like all the people they talked to, you know, they were working even CIA, NSA like the you know, people who we expect to have the world's best technology. They really don't.
29:19
And Peter knew that because he somehow the CIA, NSA, whatever when PayPal was running they're like you guys want to have a conversation or like you know, how how does like a like a Silicon Valley kind of outcast get a CIA tip?
29:35
Yeah, I mean, my I don't know specifically.
29:38
I mean, how they described it to me, I think was like they learned a lot about how the world works through the anti-fraud part of PayPal.
29:47
And the core idea was that um they could find these fraud rings just using a graph database.
29:52
Just literally, you know, people make a bunch of fake identities, they send the money from one fake identity to another.
29:59
And if you're just using SQL or a row-based method, you just couldn't figure it out.
30:05
But the second you like graphed it out, you would find this ring.
30:09
And you know uh what they found was that, you know, the the three-letter agencies didn't to that technology.
30:18
So you know, what I needed to do was instead of taking my worldview from the media or, you know, today from social media or from you know, what reporters were sort of distilling for me, what I needed to do was listen to people who had actually lived direct experience in doing something unusual and strange in my second year of people.
30:38
That's simple, but that's still really hard to like Oh, yeah.
30:42
Well, it was smacking me in the face and I I didn't realize it.
30:43
It's promotion waiting on you, right? At Microsoft.
30:46
Yeah, I was trying to make it to level 60. Yeah.
30:47
Level 60 is like hardly it's like level three or something. It's brutal.
30:54
And by the way, Palantir I've got friends that are there and and I've learned a little bit about it reading like it did not Peter Thiel, I think it's easy for me to say.
31:01
Peter Thiel back then seemed like an obvious winner.
31:04
But the Palantir idea didn't like it seemed to it seemed like it didn't work for like two years or something like that.
31:09
Like it was definitely it seemed like it had this normal startup trajectory where it's like it's not working, maybe it's working, it's definitely not working.
31:16
All right, now it actually has legs.
31:17
You know, the the YC trough of sorrow thing.
31:18
Like it seemed like it had those normal normal like issues except for like maybe five years.
31:25
Yeah, it took many many years before it started driving revenue and you know, became real.
31:29
you know, became real. Um yeah, the trickiest thing like YC companies always come to me and ask like what could I learn from the Palantir experience and I'm like, are you is your name Peter Thiel and are you willing to put, you know, tens of millions of dollars of
31:42
your own money into it before and sort of wait and be incredibly patient and ignore all the signs that you're, you know, weren't getting revenue and not, you know, actually working for so long to the point that, you know, suddenly it started absolutely working and working like 10 times better than you thought it would. Like that's just not a thing that people
31:59
Like that's just not a thing that people are really capable of doing on certainly their first million dollars or their first, you know, Palantir is sort of like the the most amazing version of like the second or third startup that people do.
32:13
Like your first startup, you got to just gut it out sometimes.
32:15
It's like how do you like get to your first million dollars, right?
32:20
Well, that is the name of the podcast.
32:21
So, I'm curious what's your advice or take on that? Like how did you do it?
32:27
How did you think about it?
32:27
And knowing what you know now how would you go make your first million? Yeah.
32:33
I mean, what's funny is in the end like Palantir ended up being huge, but it took it didn't really IPO until many many years later.
32:40
It's like I mean, I designed the logo in 2006.
32:42
I joined as employee number 10.
32:45
We would do these ridiculous things like go to Stanford and give out pizza and then we were like 10 people, 15 people working there.
32:53
But the pizza box would have our Palantir logo that I designed and like join the next Google.
33:00
And people would like eat the pizza and they'd like give us dirty looks like how dare you?
33:05
What the heck is wrong with you guys? And then um let's see.
33:09
My first win, I mean the Palantir shares did turn out to be something, but it did not seem like it was going to for a really long time.
33:17
I think my first actual million dollars was selling a few million dollars worth of Twitter stock at IPO.
33:23
And so it was actually really late like 20 I mean for me, I started working in tech like when I was 14, so like 1996 and 95.
33:35
And then I mean, I think it yeah, literally took like 18 years of like working as an engineer and not having money and having like $50,000 credit card debt coming out of college and I think that might have even been one of the reasons why I didn't uh quit to join Palantir.
33:52
I was like it it felt, you know, in 2004, I still had like 30 40,000 dollars in credit card debt and like maybe $50,000 in student loans.
33:59
I just like I was like, well, like 70,000 is a lot, but you know, how am I going to actually Yeah, I don't know if this job will even exist in six or nine months and like I could be a lifer at Microsoft.
34:11
And of course, in retrospect like being a lifer at Microsoft would be sort of like a life of torture at some level.
34:19
So yeah, my first million was actually Twitter stock.
34:21
So I started a company in 2008 called Posterous. It was a blog platform. I used to use it. I love Posterous.
34:27
Yeah, it was uh dead simple blogs by email.
34:31
Um you just emailed post@posterous. com.
34:34
You didn't have to log in or like learn how to use software.
34:35
And then we just reply back with like, here's your blog, like here's your website.
34:39
And you know, you could send it to your friends and you could it was sort of like an email list too, so you could do it with your family.
34:46
A lot of people used it to like share photos with their family.
34:47
It grew 10x year on year two years in a row until Instagram came out.
34:53
I remember when Instagram came out Posterous was actually one of the little check marks.
34:59
It's lost to the sands of time.
34:59
I think it was like you know, Posterous, Tumblr um Foursquare, Twitter.
35:04
And like that was the sharing page.
35:07
And I remember Chris Sacca, one of our investors, emailed us about it and was like, hey, what do you think about Instagram?
35:15
And before I could reply, my co-founder replied, it sucks.
35:19
I was like and I was like and we got a one-line reply to it from Sacca saying, I'm very disappointed in you guys.
35:25
And then I just was like, you know, sleep deprived and think about it again.
35:29
But like I think about that all the time now cuz, you know, when you're working on a startup like, you know, we didn't actually even totally understand why we were growing that fast.
35:38
Um in retrospect, it was actually because the iPhone was new and people were taking lots of photos and there were no apps that made it easy to upload.
35:47
And then Instagram was sort of the first free app that created a network that also even had a little bit of utility with their filters. And it was all free.
35:58
And basically you know, we got run over by the eventual winner.
36:02
And you know, I think that's one of the big dangers for founders period is when we launched in 2008 you know, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch wrote about it and he framed us off the bat.
36:14
He was like, Posterous is you know, way easier to use than Tumblr.
36:19
And so we sort of made a mistake and took like that competition and then made it our identity.
36:24
And it's something that advice is I have to give to founders all the time now, which is like we weren't competing up against Tumblr, we were competing against how people were getting photos off of their phone actually.
36:37
But you know, when you're not careful, you sort of allow media or other people to sort of frame your reality and then you just play the wrong game.
36:45
Like Tumblr didn't even want to be Tumblr.
36:49
That ended up having zero enterprise value.
36:52
I think that's also one of the cool things about Silicon Valley is like you can even sort of screw it up.
36:55
You know, if I really introspect on what I wish happened, you know, we had about a million users who were like super dedicated to Posterous.
37:04
We easily could have you know, sort of charged $5 or $10 a month for it.
37:11
We would, you know, we were a team of like 12 people.
37:13
We easily would have been profitable.
37:15
And then I remember because we were hanging out with our friends at Weebly like David Rusenko and Dan Veltri who were amazing.
37:25
I mean, they they were they only ever raised you know, a tiny amount of money out of demo day and never raised a series A.
37:30
And what did they eventually sell for like 300 400 million dollars?
37:34
Yeah, at to Square like sort of I think pre-IPO.
37:36
And then Square of course like went on its crazy run.
37:39
So these guys are like made, you know a hundred times more money than me and my co-founder at Posterous.
37:46
Like, you know, rightly so.
37:49
They did it not through like continuing to raise venture dollars, but by being profitable, cash flowing, by compounding, by focusing on their users and like playing their own game instead of playing the game that was like can be sort of chosen for you by either your investors or social media or by reporters and tech tech press.
38:08
Like you know, just play your own game.
38:11
Like make up your own mind.
38:13
So you know, if I did it again like we easily probably could have done that.
38:18
And then instead, I think we ended up pivoting out of um you know, that Posterous idea and we were just wanting to continue to chase this idea that we could be the free social network.
38:30
And I distinctly remember meeting Peter Fenton at Benchmark and he passed on our series A because we didn't have a good answer for this.
38:39
He asked you know, are you a platform or are you a network? And we said both.
38:42
Cuz you know, that's what founders who like don't have strong opinions end up saying, I think.
38:46
Like It's a multiple choice test.
38:49
You just circled A and B. Can't be wrong that way. But I don't know.
38:54
This is all, you know, 2020 hindsight.
38:56
I mean, we use I use these stories all the time to try to help founders get on the right path to real enterprise value all the time now. All right?
39:05
So, you know, it's not just make something people want and raise a series A and B and like look like a successful startup.
39:10
It's actually make something people want and that's the ending itself.
39:14
And if you do that, like you're going to make money and you know, hopefully you can uh compound that and like, you know, create real enterprise value for yourself.
39:23
And that's that's sort of the game.
39:26
I'll be I'll be wanting to ask you a bunch of a bunch of questions about different stories cuz you probably have a lot a lot of stories.
39:32
But what's interesting about that story is you you let Palantir is a very I don't know if it felt it that way then, but now it's a very serious company where like they prevent terrorist attacks at times.
39:43
So like it's a very serious product.
39:45
Uh what you were working on after that, you could like someone could be like, "Well, that's just like a blogging platform or that's just this like that's that's quote less serious."
39:56
Did you ever like I mean, I guess I'm self-projecting cuz I feel this way sometimes where I'm like I'm doing something that's not serious.
40:03
But you kind of have done both and you've done now you're back to a a relatively serious thing.
40:06
It's a YC is a multi-billion dollar company.
40:08
Uh how do you balance like like working on something that seems fun and cool versus like a serious big thing?
40:17
I mean, I think that goes back to what we were saying a little bit earlier, which is just like be careful what frame you accept.
40:24
It's all made up, but uh you get to make it up and then um you know, for Posturous and blogging like they said the same thing about Facebook.
40:30
And I remember spending time with Boaz and you know, a bunch of the you know, our friends who were early Facebookers.
40:36
They never accepted the frame that Facebook was not a serious and important thing.
40:41
You know, they their narrative was very clear.
40:46
Like they had a very strong cult.
40:48
And the cult was just clearly once every few decades, I think very explicitly Zach would say this.
40:53
Like once every few decades, like everything would change.
40:57
Media would totally change.
40:59
And like they were right.
40:59
Like this social layer came up.
41:02
And um you know, this is sort of the reason why I feel like if you're running a business today, you kind of have to be a creator because if you're not a creator you got to buy eyeballs somehow and uh guess who's got the monopoly on eyeballs?
41:16
You know, Larry and Sergey and Mark Zuckerberg.
41:20
You got to go pay you you you got to pay the toll to you know, go across the bridge.
41:25
Like you know, the second price auction mechanism in uh the ad networks for like all incremental attention is so valuable that these are like the most durable powerful network effects businesses that like cannot be disrupted.
41:40
So wait, are you telling all YC founders to go and build an audience online?
41:43
Oh, if you're doing consumer, you have you basically have to, right?
41:47
And sometimes even if you're dev tools like you have to do the same the same thing if you're a B2B like isn't it even more valuable cuz you need a smaller more targeted audience?
41:55
Oh yeah, that'd be great.
41:55
It's just harder to target.
41:56
That's that's a that's a pretty interesting thing. You didn't say this.
41:59
I'm putting words in your mouth.
42:00
But if you are saying to all the Oh yeah.
42:04
Yeah, we have Mark Kinkus coming to speak at our mini conference later today and you know, we're going to talk about it.
42:09
It's like how do you actually get incremental customers and distribution really matters for consumer businesses.
42:15
But that's also why you know, we've had a dearth in really breakout consumer businesses for 10 years.
42:23
Um you know, I I think that this will change.
42:24
I mean, with AI AI does change things.
42:27
I don't think it's broken the distribution advantage.
42:28
You know, I think that the big tech companies have a total stranglehold on the incremental user and you have to pay them still.
42:36
Uh I mean, it's just purely market dynamic, right?
42:39
Like you know, we're selling widget X or game X or dating site X or whatever it is, but you know, our you know, buddy from college or you know, or someone from halfway around the world in Eastern Europe can like take what we've done and like do the exact same thing or go to our supplier in China and like get the same drop shipping relationship.
42:58
And so at that point like the second price auction means like well, I want that customer.
43:04
No, I want that customer.
43:04
No, I want that customer. Guess what? It's an auction.
43:07
Like every incremental dollar that is gross margin, Google or Facebook will just extract because it's a perfect marketplace.
43:16
And that's just the world we live in right now.
43:18
And then you know, I think that the purest form of alpha that exists still is saying interesting valuable things that um you know, in the YouTube algorithm and the X algorithm and you know, um to a less extent like Instagram.
43:33
I mean, I think TikTok is actually pretty wild.
43:37
Like they're just giving away distribution over there especially for brand new creators.
43:40
Um I think Meta is probably really dropping the ball on how they're thinking about creators.
43:47
They just like I don't know what's going on over there.
43:49
Seems like they only want to satisfy the people who are already big, which you know, is not that helpful for people who are trying to do new things.
43:58
Um but yeah, that's that's sort of the regime we live in.
44:00
Um you know, for B2B what we see at YC is that you know, probably 70 or 80% of companies are B2B.
44:10
And uh our most well-attended mini conference every batch is actually the sales mini conference.
44:13
Um you know, uh Pete Kazanjy founder sales like that book we give a copy of that to like literally every founder.
44:21
A lot of it is about a mindset shift.
44:23
Like most people have never been rejected 95 out of 100 times.
44:29
Like it's just so like soul-crushing to get no that many times in your life.
44:31
But it's also you know, for 80 90% of businesses today, you better get good.
44:39
If your website conversion rate's 5%, you're doing phenomenal.
44:42
You go out and knock on 100 doors and get 95 no's, you feel like you're the biggest failure in the world.
44:47
It's the same conversation, right? because you got five.
44:48
You got five enterprise contracts paying you $10,000 to $100,000 a year.
44:52
Like you're the biggest winner in the world.
44:54
Like that's how this stuff works.
44:56
We got to ask you about some of the people that you've been able to meet.
45:01
I'll tell you what I want and I hope that you give it to us.
45:04
I don't know if you will or you won't.
45:06
But like so me and Sam kind of are in the what I'll call like the way that most people live their life, which is you wake up every day, you got your project, your business.
45:14
It doesn't matter if you're doing, you know, $10,000 a month or 100,000 or 10 million dollars a month. Doesn't really matter.
45:20
You wake up every day and then we all look for kind of like this entertainment inspiration thing.
45:23
And we get a lot of it from Twitter, from podcast.
45:27
And one of the best things is when you hear about the way that some of the people you admire operate or the way that they they handle things or the way that they dealt with a situation or something about their personality.
45:38
And of course it's sort of you know, a caricature.
45:40
It's not a perfect picture and you know, whatever.
45:42
They're not perfect people.
45:43
But it is badass to hear those stories.
45:45
And we hear them about Elon.
45:46
But you run in a really amazing circle where, you know, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, like all of the YC network or people you've been around.
45:53
You've been around them before they were, you know, big and and and since.
45:57
I would love if you could tell us a couple of like either personality traits or stories that stand out for some of the people. So I'm curious.
46:05
It's a long-winded way of saying, can you tell me some cool stories about some of these characters Yeah, absolutely.
46:11
The funniest story I remember from working with uh Paul Graham in the office.
46:15
I mean, he gave me my first shot as an investor and as an advisor to startups.
46:20
I was burnt out from Posturous.
46:21
We my co-founder and I had like a falling out and um he wanted to become Google Groups.
46:26
And I was like, "Dude, I don't even think that Google wants to be running Google Groups.
46:29
Like what we should just charge money."
46:33
But um yeah, Paul like I think really did like Paul and Jessica basically like did all the admissions, worked with all the companies. This is like 2011.
46:42
You know, even the whole YC campus was not a campus.
46:47
It was like a warehouse with some carpet and some like custom like very cheap I mean, it's just tables and benches.
46:56
The benches were so rickety that like if you sat on one side like and the other person on the other side like you know, stood up like you'd fall over.
47:05
Like there's just like a bunch of funny things about YC early.
47:07
It was like this tiny thing.
47:09
Um and to paint a picture like people still when I said I was going to go work at YC uh as a designer in residence, my friends in venture or startups would say, "Oh, that's nice."
47:24
It sounded like I was going to volunteer at like a high school camp or something.
47:28
It was like a high school basketball camp or something.
47:29
I was like, "Oh, that's Oh, that's nice.
47:33
That's so you know, I hope you enjoy that."
47:35
Like you're doing community service. Good for you. Good for you. Exactly.
47:38
And um you know, Dropbox had happened as a you know, and it had become a billion dollar company.
47:44
But uh Airbnb I think was just about to become a billion dollar company.
47:50
And uh you know, I I I think this is lost to the sands of time, but I remember Sarah Lacy had created a had a written a book called like one year lucky, two year good.
47:59
So that you know, 2011 I think was the one year lucky, two year good moment for YC where people realized, "Oh, this isn't like some fringe thing.
48:06
It's actually starting to churn out like basically the most dominant startups that exist."
48:13
It's like a very concentrated form of Silicon Valley.
48:17
And uh about that time um yeah, we had there was literally one person who did all the books, all the finances, all the audits, all the CFO stuff.
48:27
And uh she needed a copy machine.
48:27
So she got one of those like uh sort of waist height copy machines that um you know, look corporate.
48:35
And it had like these little stickers on it.
48:37
And then I remember Paul Graham came in.
48:41
He's like, "What is this? Why is this here?"
48:43
And it was like sort of this totem of um corporateness.
48:49
He's like, "I remember seeing these at Yahoo and I hated them."
48:50
Like he started like scraping off the sticker that had like the phone number of the little company that uh would maintain the the copy machine.
49:00
And uh I guess it just jumps out at me as like this very interesting quirk of Paul that was like absolutely right.
49:08
And you know, I sort of stay up at night thinking about like how do I make sure that YC never feels corporate?
49:14
PG I mean, like PG would show up in like shorts and uh Birkenstocks all you know, all day.
49:19
I think he he wore khaki pants to my wedding.
49:23
So my mother my my sister-in-law was like, "Excuse me, sir.
49:27
This is a private wedding."
49:27
And I'm like, "No, no, no. That's my boss."
49:32
Um so I mean, there's this I think what I learned from Paul was that um I think there is an insidious nature to like formality and um corporateness and just like having to wear a suit or the convention, right?
49:51
Like I think there's incredible value in being very, very unconventional.
49:56
Whenever there is prestige and/or convention, you should be wary of that thing because, you know, there's got to be some other weird soul-sucking things that are associated with that that you know, no one by default would sort of choose to have, you know, a dress code or like what you know, what are some other examples of this?
50:15
Like you know, basically you should be aware of about your own formality and um try to fight against it.
50:23
It's just like try to be super matter-of-fact um and I think that that's that's one of the things that just makes companies bad.
50:32
I I wonder like as people who run your own businesses, do you ever think about that?
50:35
Like you go into a meeting and you just think like was that a meeting that if I were not me running this place, like would I want to be in that meeting?
50:43
Well, it's the same thing as what you said about the framing thing.
50:44
You you behave like you think you're supposed to behave versus what kind of makes sense.
50:49
Um you start playing business a little bit.
50:51
It's it's sort of like, you know, when you start a company, a lot of people play business by getting like a business card before they get a customer and then you kind of snap out of it.
51:00
You're like, "No, dude, I got to make the damn thing."
51:01
You start making the damn thing and you start getting some customers and then you kind of go back to playing business again. Yeah.
51:06
Um which which is definitely part of the Silicon Valley thing.
51:08
You know, like OKRs, measuring things quarterly.
51:13
Like there is a bunch of like lameness that I myself fall victim to and you have to like pull yourself out of that trap.
51:18
But but some of it is like useful, I guess.
51:20
If you're Airbnb, you you have to if you have 6,000 employees, you you do slow down.
51:24
But it's hard to know what's truth versus what like or what you should do versus what you have to do type of thing.
51:30
I will say that I think um it's possible for people to do uh insane business now with like two pizza teams.
51:38
Like I think that we, you know, probably in your community or maybe you guys yourselves will end up making these like hundred million to like billion-dollar a year businesses that are totally empowered by large language models that like do not need more than 20 people working at them.
51:55
I think that this is literally the most exciting news that you know, we're pretty sure is going to happen the next few years, especially right now.
52:05
And like that is the one thing that these giant companies that have like thousands of people like it is completely like corporate America is completely unprepared for this moment.
52:18
Like they're just going to get run over by a thousand startups that are way more agile that, you know, aren't completely drowning in convention.
52:25
They can just do the right thing for the customer and the cost basis will come down a ton.
52:30
You know, the the trickiest thing is like I'm not sure if it's inflationary deflationary.
52:34
Like what's going to happen here, right?
52:36
Like prices in theory should come down.
52:38
Things should get a lot more competitive.
52:39
I mean, on the flip side like the hope is that all of our, you know, products and services get um a lot better, cheaper, faster real fast.
52:51
I mean, this is the moment.
52:51
Like literally we talked to people who are engine managers and like CTOs and like even engineering teams.
52:57
I you know, I think that it's almost generational.
53:00
Like we get it's like in the water for us right now cuz we spend all of our time with like 22, 25, 28-year-olds who were like the me from, you know, 15 years ago.
53:10
Like we're just helping the next generation right now and they were like born on the internet.
53:13
They were born with large language models, you know, and then there's sort of you know, frankly, I'm 43.
53:20
Like my generation of C-levels, like I don't like I don't think people are prepared or even aware of what's about to happen right now and it's like super, super good news for anyone who's running a business who is super agile cuz you don't have to be doomed to calling in the business process automation call center.
53:39
You don't have to like hire the team in the Philippines anymore.
53:43
If anything, like that's one of the more direct advice we give to people looking for startup ideas in the batch right now.
53:50
If people are pivoting, we're like, "Okay, well, you're selling to let's say like accounting firms.
53:55
Um you know, but you're having trouble with enterprise sales.
53:59
What if you targeted people who already spend, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on a call center in the Philippines or Eastern Europe or anywhere else?
54:09
Like why don't you just reach out to people like that and just replace what they rely on, you know, there with large language models that have great evals and great workflow?
54:21
Like that is just, you know, I think we will have many companies driving tens to hundreds of millions of dollars like literally in the next like two years.
54:29
It's just like hundreds of them, thousands of them are going to pop up right now just doing that. That's so exciting.
54:35
What companies are you super excited about that we should watch out for or we should go check out cuz you live in the future.
54:42
You're you're further in the future than we are.
54:45
Obviously like uh the tooling for this is important.
54:47
Like there's going to be a lot around um helping people build the stuff.
54:51
Um you eval like evals in particular like doing it test-driven is important, you know, um the danger for most founders right now is it's very easy to make demo ware that you can use to raise money.
55:06
And then you're tempted to sort of, you know, quote-unquote raw dog your prompts.
55:10
Like you will just write code that has some prompts and you won't write any tests.
55:14
And then uh the funny thing that we're seeing right now that I think is super true is again, like going back to what we were saying earlier.
55:23
Like it's important to build your worldview on how the world works directly from customers and their customer data.
55:28
So the sort of rinse and repeat thing that's like maybe 80% of YC what YC companies are doing right now that I think anyone could do is go and find real people who like are running businesses and they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on giant teams of people doing like rote, repeating knowledge work.
55:50
And then get access to their data.
55:53
Get access to the flow of their work.
55:56
Watch how they do it and then literally write test cases using and if there's hallucination or uh the LLMs aren't actually able to like consistently do the thing you want, you actually have to chop down the prompts more.
56:09
Like you're asking for the LLM to do too much.
56:11
Like the LLMs are capable of maybe like 120 IQ level work right now.
56:16
And if you're, you know, giving it like too much in the context window and asking it to output too much, it's just like uh do it in steps, right?
56:25
This is literally what 01 and uh you know, reasoning already does using chain of thoughts.
56:31
The interesting thing and weird thing that I'm tracking right now that I'm a little bit worried about is it is entirely possible that the next generation of uh large language models from Anthropic and OpenAI and Meta are, you know, one and then two orders of magnitude uh in num in like compute and number of parameters.
56:51
And then we just get like, you know, the Daru Amade scaling laws paper specifically says like you know, these big large language model uh AI labs are going to spend a billion and then 10 billion dollars on the next generations.
57:06
And like if we get like continuous step function improvement, like the trickiest thing is like all the stuff that even what we're doing as founders are doing, like, you know, maybe the models will just do for themselves.
57:18
And uh you know, I think that my hope is that um you know, there's not enough agency in these things and then, you know, maybe what will happen and what what we hope and what we think will happen is that the people who establish brands and motes and evals right now, when the next generation models happen, their cost structure just comes down by like 10x.
57:44
And then they already have like the revenue and the the market captured in some way that they're like sort of beating the software incumbents that they're going up against.
57:54
They themselves have like tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and then like basically the standard motes apply.
58:02
Like look at Porter's five forces and you're like, you know, uh your data you have way way better access to data.
58:08
Your your systems are way smarter.
58:10
It costs a lot of money to take a risk and switch off of those systems and then you under you have a sales force that is way better and smarter.
58:20
And so if you take all, you know, that's sort of the gambit right now.
58:22
Like if you do prompts and evals, you're pulling forward the future by a few years.
58:29
You're trying to like grab as much land as you possibly can right now.
58:32
And uh and then from there, like hopefully you can hold on and build the next Microsoft or the next Salesforce or, you know, the next 10, you know, 10 to 100 billion-dollar company.
58:45
Was it obvious when Sam Altman left YC to do this?
58:48
I wish I was smart enough to predict that this was what was going to happen.
58:53
Did you think that he was going to be the man like he is now?
58:54
Like, you know, Paul Paul Graham has that essay where he's like, "Here's five people I'd bet on."
59:00
And one of them, the fifth one was like a 25-year-old Sam Altman and the other three were like, you know, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and then he said, "This kid."
59:09
Uh so did you were you like, "Whatever Sam does is going to be a generational company."
59:14
or were you like, "It might be.
59:16
It could be mildly successful."
59:18
I mean, I think it could be.
59:20
I bet In full transparency, like I'm going to be super honest.
59:22
I was like, "Man, I don't I don't quite get it, you know."
59:26
I He uh when he was sitting in my my shoes as president of YC, uh he'd come back and I remember sitting in the group partner room and he'd say like, well, this is what Elon was talking about and this is what Larry was talking about and you know, they were all talking about AI and they were you know, sort of talking about these sci-fi scenarios.
59:45
Um, and I'm like, man, I saw Terminator 2 too, but that was a movie, okay?
59:53
And I think that I'm changing my tune at this point.
59:56
Like it it you know, I wish that it was smart enough to be you know, actually totally a believer.
1:00:01
You know, I'm a believer now.
1:00:03
Um, do I believe that we're going to end up in like a doomsday scenario?
1:00:07
Like I still don't really believe that there's that much agency in these things, which is sort of the reason why now is questionable, you know?
1:00:14
First Peter first Palantir now open AI.
1:00:17
You know, you'll thank thank God that you've like already made up so many other successful investments that I know that Garry's got good judgment and like can predict the future a little bit because uh I'll come around eventually, you know, like I'm just a year off.
1:00:29
Yeah, yeah, he he he was Palantir employee 10.
1:00:34
After he said no to the co-founder role, he ended up there, right?
1:00:36
So I mean, now we're you know, we are full believers in large language models, but I you know, I think the thing that's a little bit lost to the sands of time is that you know, what what Sam was absolutely right about was jumping on this thing that the smartest people in the world were already talking about like 8 9 years ago and then he built it.
1:00:53
You know, he invested the money, he you know, brought together the people.
1:01:00
It was no small task to bring together the smartest AI researchers in the world and then not only that, it was like semi miracle.
1:01:09
You know, you could ask why didn't meta do this before?
1:01:11
Why didn't Google do this before?
1:01:13
Why didn't Microsoft research do this before?
1:01:14
Like all of those people had virtually limitless access to resources.
1:01:19
And um to weave this back together I think there is something really terrible and limiting about like giant organizations that are not capable of evolving and making smart decisions.
1:01:37
I mean, that's what big tech is like.
1:01:39
They're sort of like big daycares for the most technical smart people in the world and it's like here's your do you know, play some volleyball, we'll cook you lunch.
1:01:46
Like here you know, here's do your laundry at work, you know, like you know, let's totally infantilize the smartest people in the world and like that's a waste of time.
1:01:54
Like what needed to happen was um, the ability you know, I one of the things that God explained to me why uh, it was open AI that came up and like invested, you know, millions first and then tens of millions and hundreds of millions into the large language model and you know, transformers for language.
1:02:16
Um if you were at Google, you needed to work this bureaucracy.
1:02:19
work this bureaucracy. It was like highly political, you know, you had hundreds of other researchers, all of whom were all as smart as you and you had a finite sort of limited set of compute and you know, what you would find is that Google would do really breathtakingly amazing work but then
1:02:39
you'd have like 30 different authors, you know, and if you'd read the paper, there'd be like these sort of like strange things that seem like it was a little bit tacked on, but that's the only way you could get the compute resources to actually pull off a training run on like the model that you wanted to do. Like you had to do some
1:02:55
Like you had to do some weird things to accommodate like people who were going to commit their training resources for their like random little thing.
1:03:04
And so it's funny to see that you know, human progress is more or less a little bit uh, impeded by the bureaucracy and lack of governance and lack of agency that large organizations just sort of like impose on people.
1:03:18
Like you don't have a choice.
1:03:20
Isn't it crazy that it was easier for them to invent and discover transformers and and this large language model breakthrough than it was for them to navigate the bureaucracy to actually like create a product out of this or do anything useful with it?
1:03:33
Like that should tell you kind of everything you need to know.
1:03:37
And I mean, the wild thing is like even within open AI, like they did everything right.
1:03:40
Like GPT-3 was very impressive, 3.
1:03:43
5 was even more, four was incredible, but like they were going to just put it behind an API and like explicitly for many years open AI was supposed to be a you know, we're a research lab, not a product company.
1:03:57
And you know, it took the to relatively Herculean efforts by product people inside open AI to even release um you know, chat GPT, which turned out to be the greatest consumer launch of maybe the in the history of consumer launches actually.
1:04:14
Hey, you said and I and I know we got to wrap up in a second, but you said um you keep talking about the thing that's pretty amazing about talking of to the smart people and like what what are they what are they talking about?
1:04:23
You have access to more of those types of people than probably most anyone on Earth.
1:04:28
What's the conversation right now or is it is it all AI still?
1:04:31
Yeah, I mean ultimately that's sort of the number one thing that we're pretty excited about.
1:04:36
I mean that you know, a few people who are really smart can sit in a room and I mean, make a thing that literally does what humans do all day.
1:04:47
You know, I I would make a pitch that often the best things that could be automated are actually very rote.
1:04:55
They're sort of the knowledge worker equivalent of like hand looming a carpet or something.
1:05:02
It's like all I do all day is look at an email box, see if someone paid their bill, reconcile that against a ledger in QuickBooks.
1:05:10
Like can you imagine you know, millions of people, like tens of millions of people on the planet?
1:05:14
Like that's their 9 to 5, you know?
1:05:16
9 to 5, you know? Like that that is not a good use of uh, very smart human being uh, generally speaking and like those are sort of the things that are most easily replaced by really great prompting and great evals and frankly I think you know, there are going to be 20
1:05:34
person software engineering focused startups that basically turn um, you know, billions of dollars in payroll into billions of dollars in software revenue and hopefully those people go on to do much smarter and much more interesting jobs than like passing butter all day. That's amazing. Garry, if you have 1 That's amazing.
1:05:55
Garry, if you have 1 minute, can you tell the spoon bending story?
1:05:58
I think this is the a very powerful story that you have the spoon bending party.
1:06:03
I don't know if you you know this is it's hilarious.
1:06:05
I mean, you know, I've been to Burning Man a few times. I love Burning Man.
1:06:08
times. I love Burning Man. It's my favorite place to take a break from consensus reality and realize that it's all made up, but you get to make it up and uh you know, there's a lot of like weird fringe stuff, a lot of like 60s like
1:06:21
esoterica, you know, you're just wandering around the desert on a bike with your buddies and you know, I think uh we randomly walked into a spoon bending party where they were you know, it was a huge group of I think it was almost like a magician at the front like sort of helping people. You know, the the stick
1:06:37
You know, the the stick was that they were going to teach you how to bend a spoon with your mind.
1:06:44
I was like, okay, that's cool.
1:06:44
Like let's go check it out.
1:06:45
They passed out these spoons.
1:06:48
Um, and then it was like a magic trick.
1:06:50
They said, okay, now bend your spoon with like look at your spoon and bend it with your mind.
1:06:58
And then in between they would say like, okay, well, sometimes you need to use your hands and like warm up the spoon to bend it.
1:07:04
And then basically uh I think what you're supposed to do literally is just bend the spoon with your hands.
1:07:14
And that's what you know, and then what's funny is by the end of it half of the people like I had I had a bent spoon cuz I was like, oh yeah, like they said like, oh I should you know, sort of warm up the spoon with my hands and bend it with my hands.
1:07:25
Is that just to get it started?
1:07:28
Yeah, just yeah, just to get it started, right?
1:07:30
And then by the end like half of the room had bent spoons and the other half didn't and the ones that didn't were like, how did you do that?
1:07:37
That's absolutely incredible.
1:07:39
And I was like, guys, it's a bit. It's a bit.
1:07:41
Like you have to you know, first know that you can bend the spoon with your mind, but then you bend it with your hands, guys.
1:07:47
Like that's that's literally like the stick actually and it's a little bit of an allegory for you know, bias to action and what you're supposed to do in real life.
1:07:56
Like real life is sort of like this exercise.
1:07:58
Like they say like you can go change the world and you can do it with your you know, with your very ideas, but like you know, that alone is not enough.
1:08:07
Like you actually have to go with your hands and go talk to users and you know, sit and build a thing.
1:08:12
And so you know, don't forget the second half.
1:08:17
And the wildest thing is like more than half of the room could not do it.
1:08:19
And so if you are the person who's able to bend the you know, bend the spoon with your mind. Like guess what?
1:08:26
You also used your hands.
1:08:27
Like you got to do that and you know, and actually like that's maybe like the greatest gift.
1:08:32
It's just like Dude, Garry, you're the man. You are the best. I love talking to you.
1:08:39
You make me feel really great.
1:08:41
You give me energy and we're very very very thankful that you took the time to do this.
1:08:49
Thank you guys so much for having me.
1:08:50
Always great to see you guys and you know, congrats on all the success and excited to see where you and your community go.
1:08:55
I mean, you know, we're we're all building the future out here.
1:08:59
Well, thank you for saying that. Take care, Garry.