"hey how's it going this is Craig Cannon and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast so today we have an uncut interview from the Masters of scale podcast and in it Reed Hoffman the co-founder of Li..."

"so I'm here with Sam Altman president of Y Combinator who is a good friend and has been involved in many scaling things let's start with your entrepreneurial like what got you in entrepreneurship how ..."

"just kept going and is there anything that even this the very beginning is there anything from now having done looped and a bunch of things we're gonna get into that if you could call that younger sel..."

"know let your life ramp up and then do it so that's one thing I think another thing is why don't anything I'm super easy to work with today but I was like sort of infamously difficult to work with whe..."

"money and do I really believe that this is going to be a market that will support a giant company and I think there is a check point where you need several checkpoints along the way where people don't..."

"they all had a smartphone and and and people that once they had one like you know you read these statistics and people need to do some lightweight journalism about like would you rather give up your s..."

"this but you know the first use case for PayPal was splitting the dinner check on Palm Pilots I do know that and apparently like legend had set it up so that it could only happen once because it was a..."

"size of cheque you could do but it was still possible to like once a year make an angel investment as a founder and now I just think you can't because the amounts of money and seiran's have gone up so..."

"expected which was great um go in a little bit more details about what the things were that was like oh here was the because this is one of the things where you see the potential scale like I see this..."

"a really dumb thing one of the things that is funny as a side note and just as a note to anyone that tries to do anything where you take a company in a different direction or scale it is that it is al..."

"company and probably undervalued if everyone else does it's stupid so we were able to do that and and the first thing was expand YC into all these different directions I think the greatest companies a..."

"couple we can serve we raised a later stage fund because one of the other things realize especially with the hard tech companies you know you can fund a lot of these companies at some point they need ..."

"structure so being able to do all these things and in terms of the efforts to scale YC is like this global geography there's early in late-stage there's research that you also you know taking nonprofi..."

"proud of the organization on us without me having to legislate it if there's a company we look at where we think we'd make a lot of money but it'd be we think it might be bad for the world we won't to..."

"of from what I know about it it was it was just like it you know the growth in the number of people of an organization sneaks up on you and you can completely get away without any structure until you ..."

"startups have the kind of bond with us where they reflect what we do so I think on the whole it is good we did not try to go solve a bunch of problems by May got lots of capital so let's go to the YC ..."

"do is like pick it up and swing it and see like how its weighted how it feels and this particular one it had like like you know like the nicks of where it hit people's helmets a couple thousand years ..."

"you should have an open application and you don't shouldn't require an intro it's great now doing it well in practice is hard because it is very tiring and very draining to talk to 40,000 people a yea..."

"time they go back and everybody else there is like well I can get into I see now it's not so hard and so we just see this there's like this uh you know there's like this there's this incredible chain ..."

"can do it remotely and anyone can do it so now let's go to a couple of the kind of great you know just amazing YC companies so there's a number we talked about stripe a little earlier as one of your e..."

"problem but it's still a real problem how do we build that so that is the kind of scaling that works and it has generated Facebook Google I mean a lot of it's the same playbook um I think the kind of ..."

"what they did they actually went and did all those thing exactly exactly so I think the way that you build a really great product is to be very close to your customers and the way that you do that is ..."

"kind of just will suffer and do you and YC teach the companies anything about culture building not enough we've we do do some of that in the early days which I think we're fairly good at but there's a..."

"really well on those four categories even if the first the second company doesn't work out you can kind of tell people that are eventually gonna be successful at something and it takes a lot of tries ..."

"I'm eventually gonna get lucky and I'm gonna just work really hard and tide you that may be the one of the better definitions of optimism that actually I think I've heard good so a little bit of the o..."

"organization I've just accepted them gonna be very interrupt-driven and then most of my time is going to be dynamically responsive to our companies that need help and I just accept that I I'm gonna th..."

"remember it was just yeah the The New Yorker thought it was analyzing area codes uh I mean New Yorker writers home for live series I don't think are particularly right no one yeah got it because I was..."

"incredibly convenient like I you can like put a lot of stuff like I like to i'd still be paperback books I like paperback books I like to carry on around with me I have like a iPhone 7 plus which is k..."

"scale things quickly and some of that is to actually build a product that actually goes you know fairly global pretty quickly is there anything in the theories that I've been doing that you think I cu..."

"Valley so let me let's let's do one more version of this a hanket useful so the central theory is say actually in fact part of what Silicon Valley itself has his network effects or its network effects..."

"relatively quickly I said that part of the network extension because when I think about how to build more Silicon Valley's it's the connectivity of Silicon Valley which is one of the things I think YC..."

"thought and I think I found managed to do it at my house like and I think people get this wrong all the time like what you actually want is a small this is a famous uh I think it's a DaVinci observati..."

"you were out of work tomorrow I would just sleep for a while if I were out of work tomorrow and do not think about work um but you know a few months later I shall go study physics and then I would get..."

"either what's one question no one has ever asked you I don't know if there's an interesting one what's the one outstanding talented job candidate that got away someone that I was gonna hire mm-hmm wel..."

"a big way the one thing you wish your phone could do I wish there was sufficiently good AI on my phone that it would only interrupt me for things I needed to see and I could say and it like and also t..."

"would say all-time favorite book oh that's a hard one well I can't pick one all-time favorite book my favorite book of the year is a book called pandemonium which is basically I see methought I was so..."

"desk I work on a couch most of the time no desk is there a single poem or passage from literature that you've memorized I memorize a lot of poems a lot of literature the you know one image that I love..."

"founders that get way too arrogant that's great actually I may use it too the single greatest embarrassment of your career I can't pick why I mean there's so many that one of the things that is good a..."

"to me what are the techniques that you teach YC founders on triage because one of the key things is to let certain fires burn while you're solving others because the you know startups are inherently d..."

"are bad uses of time great well thanks Sam as always a huge pleasure and thanks for talking with thank you all right thanks for listening so as always you can see the transcript at blog y combinator c..."