"I'm going to turn it over to our first speaker Sam Altman the president of Y Combinator who actually had the original idea for this course so I'm pretty grateful for that and he's also the man who has..."

"and thank you all for coming this is it's cool to see so many people in the room so I want to talk about why how and and what to do to invest in startups I'm only going to talk a little bit about why ..."

"who have sort of done the best in the field what their motivations are to invest perfect this was one I heard from a few people these exact three words from a few different people and this resonates w..."

"satisfying is incredibly addictive it's also satisfying because every once in a while I founder of a great company who is you know now super famous will tell you hey that thing you did for me eight or..."

"learn a lot though and if you if you treat this as something that you're gonna try to get better at and sort of deliberately practice you can learn a lot and you can get better at this really quickly ..."

"the problem is everyone does that and so there's this weird schooling effect where a company gets hot for no discernible reason or it fits a trend or whatever and then everybody wants to invest in one..."

"of investing that's the right way to do it you know if you're going to invest in stocks or bombs or whatever that's how you do it you're just compounding singles for a long time but angel investing is..."

"try to ask myself when I meet a start-up is not why is it going to fail it's not what could go wrong the first question is how big could this be if it works can I imagine this founder this idea this m..."

"companies represent about two-thirds of the value that we've created and our top one company represents about one third so this is like a nearly one-third so this is like this very extreme very counte..."

"word-of-mouth as the way to find companies to invest in has been great if you're just starting out I think what I have seen the most successful angel investors do is just start helping founders for fr..."

"we're available and we're open I think this was in the two or three most important secrets of YC this was something that we did that was really different other people hadn't done it before in fact peo..."

"lot of leverage is gone and I don't think it will come back anytime soon your reputation matters a lot it is way more important to your future success as an investor that founders like you and say tha..."

"reference checks on you just like you do on them and more and more the thing that I have seen founders use is the criteria to make the decision about which investors to work with is what the other fou..."

"everybody else we recently had a company they had let's say you know 10 investors and that we're gonna join their seed round every one of the 10 had asked for advisor shares every one of the 10 had sa..."

"I think value investing is not a winning strategy when it comes to being an angel investor most of the time all right I will try to go kind of fast through this to leave time for questions so there's ..."

"really open-minded speaking of the really big companies I think I don't know if this was always true I suspect it may have been but I think today it is easier to start a hard company than an easy comp..."

"the I don't think people think about enough one thing that we've learned at YC is to mostly pick the founders it it is difficult to hear an idea at the very early stage and say yeah this idea has what..."

"problem is they need to come up with new ideas for a company basically like every week you have to come up with crazy new ideas big changes all the time we we tried an experiment once at YC we funded ..."

"think about there there are obviously famous exceptions to this but if you think about it on the whole the founders of the really super successful companies tend to be great communicators execution sp..."

"success the rate of improvement of the founder so if you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed Ron and compare that founder to Brian Chesky you will be disappointed 100% of the time that ..."

"metric I think one thing you have to be increasingly aware of are the wrong motivations so starting a start-up is a very long-term commitment you know if it's gonna work it takes more than a decade it..."

"motivation and then another way I used to get tricked a lot is there were founders that I didn't think were that good but they had stumbled on a nice business or you know they had this metric that was..."

"obviously low integrity people that doesn't work out either okay this is maybe the third biggest misunderstand you know I had and I think for many people it's their number one biggest misunderstanding..."

"but you should prefer a small market growing super quickly to a very large market today super counterintuitive if you chase the things that worked in the last set of companies which is what most inves..."

"if this is not something where you can just sort of follow what everybody else says by definition you've got to learn to form your own thoughts about about what the next really big market is going to ..."

"and I think every time someone talks about a big trend my first reaction is skepticism and I suggest yours is as well okay but how do you differentiate between a real trend and a fake trend a real tre..."

"that is the time to start investing heavily in VR can you pick that back up so so this question you know are people actually using the platform I think is a really important one when you're trying to ..."

"like good ideas I would say this is where like 90% of all angel capital in the startup ecosystem goes so this is something that is worth trying to avoid and the one very common way that people make th..."

"long-term competitive advantage the more skeptical you should be but I have found this framework just trying to think about is this a good idea that seems bad or is this a bad idea that seems good I'v..."

"that one of my friends spontaneously told me about it they were not being incentivized to that was not they didn't mark it to me didn't advertise to me it was just like someone I trusted said you got ..."

"so I long ago learned to stop trying to trust my intuition on this now and I just model it out and I try to model the decay rate about how how much I think growth will slow down but I try to say okay ..."

"have found helpful for me in in many scenarios all right unfortunately I took all the time but maybe I can do like five minutes of questions we definitely have time for some questions I just wanted to..."

"advice I think is good what flaws are acceptable in a founder and a you know series cedar series a stage um a lot I think like don't compromise on the things that don't get better like don't don't com..."

"okay how do you judge for integrity with a founder that comes out of network so in our experience we we've gotten this wrong a handful of times but we have prevented ourselves from this mistake hundre..."

"several venture firms have done very sophisticated studies of this and they have all come to the following conclusion which is if the company is raising an up runned led by a good VC say a top quartil..."

"that's possible a bad idea that seemed sorry a good idea that seemed like a bad idea you know this is like of our darlings but I just like it's a it's an example that sticks with me so much because th..."

"um you know when uber was getting going there there would be all of these articles that would come out it felt like every year where someone would say uber is not worth X the entire taxi market is onl..."