My First Million - Y Combinator CEO Shares How They Pick Winners, Advice For Founders + Lessons From Paul Graham | Garry Tan Interview

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

Episode 642: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Garry Tan ( https://x.com/garrytan ), CEO of Y Combinator, about the sauce that makes YC outperform the rest of Silicon Valley plus lessons from Paul Graham, Peter Thiel and Garry’s first million.  — Show Notes:  (0:00) Winning the game (3:16) Being the Harvard of startups (7:31) How YC outperforms most Silicon Valley investors (9:36) Spotting extreme winners (14:14) Capital-as-a-service (16:34) How Garry hustled at 14 to get his into financial security (23:04) Turning down Peter Thiel's offer to start Palantir (32:20) Garry's first million (44:57) Early days at YC (51:31) The edge of startups with a 2-pizza team (54:36) Advice for founders in AI (1:05:57) The spoon-bending story — Links: • YC - https://www.ycombinator.com/ • Founding Sales - https://www.foundingsales.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

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. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel never. Sam, have you seen? I feel like there's a new meme that got birthed.

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? Jerry, can you explain this one? posted it. I don't even know what it was a reply to, but it seems to be going viral. So it's a good meme.

I think somebody, Paul Graham was talking about cooking. He was 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. And then someone immediately, you know, random Twitter troll is like, why are you raising like a feminine man? Like, you know, he should be masculine. He doesn't need to learn to cook. And then I think Paul's reply was, learn to cook, comma, loser. and then all the builders like Amjad and other

tech people were like, you know, this is actually good general advice. Like learn to cook as a high agency way of living. I think it's like the compressed idea of, you know, build things, actually make things, actually go do things in the world that are of value. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. It's the more succinct version of make something people want. Yeah, it's the punched up version. Learn to cook loser.

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. And I'm like, is this guy, did he just, did he just pull the ultimate move? And it worked out perfectly. I think so. I think you really did. What's your version of that? I mean, more or less like YC as a concept is like kind of a miracle. It's, you know, there are very, very few 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. It's like, okay, let's, this thing is working.

And then it's working for relatively mysterious reasons that are almost too obvious. I mean, it's, but at once a mystery and it's obvious. YC itself is like pretty earnest. It's just make something people want applying this thing. We'll 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 sort of the top 1% of people trying to do that thing. And then somehow some magic happens where, you know, five to 10% of those companies become worth a billion dollars or more. And, 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 else. I mean, so it's kind of cool. It's just, you know, one plus one equals three in a really unusual way. It sort of resembles a college in some ways, you know, only instead of people paying tuition, like we pay them. You know, when I think of good brands, a lot of people will just think of like funny or cool things. But when you think of like what Black Rock or Goldman, like some of these names, they're kind of

like Harvard. Or Harvard. They're like, they're a little ominous and like a little scary, but they're institutions. 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? I mean, I think a lot of it comes back to your earlier. We were talking about Paul Graham and the guy's just a very unusual original thing. and very just clear communicator. And then I think the thing I learned from him in particular is that clear communication and you're just using basic logic being able to explain your sort of, you know,

A to B to C and then you zoom out and there's a really big idea in there. That's, you know, in essence, what a really good pitch is. You know, I think that that's where it came from. 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. I mean, this sort of 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 like sort of, you know, at once very exacting. We have very high standards, but then it's at once also very, sort of like almost family or like homie, just 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 think about this.

So one of my companies, I'm recently taken through like an M&A process, and I talked to bankers. And bankers, so you go first and interview bankers. Like, why should I go with you? Why should I give you 4% of this transaction for six months of work here at the very end? 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 invest in people before they even have an idea a lot of the time. time. They have no traction. Often they have to change ideas. We don't negotiate every deal, which 7% for every single company. Same deal. That's it. The application, yeah, it's like a one-page form.

You fill out online. Oh, the interview? Yeah, we talked to you for 10 minutes and we just give you a thumbs up, thumbs down from there. All of the things why she does are really only 10 minutes. Yeah, it's 10 minutes. Oh, my God. It's a 10 minute.

They're picking winners at a higher rate than anybody else. I think 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. higher rate, they never other investor, even though their process is simpler and less than what you would think you need in order to be, you know, the number one player in the space. And they basically, I think I've read the stat, it's pretty insane. You guys basically, every time you run a batch, you basically print $3 billion of market cap on average. I did some math and I looked at the

batch values. So, you know, like something like 5% while the companies become unicorns, but every, and you just do that a couple times a year. You're doing it twice a year. Now you're to four times a year. You're like, oh, yeah, let's just print $3 billion of market cap two to four times a year. Yeah, that is mind-blowing. Like, that is so insane. Yeah, I mean, I think the craziest thing I'd ever heard was basically the Airbnb round where I think something like under $20,000 became $2 billion and the liquid IPO when Airbnb IPOed.

And, you know, YC didn't even take the preratist. It sounds pretty wild, honestly, like, you know, easily. could have returned $5 to $7 billion with a good portfolio management strategy. But that's the thing. I think simple things work, actually. If YC was a company, because I think it's been around like 18 years,

you said. In the last 18 years, YC's got to be up there in like the top 10 Silicon Valley companies, things that got created, that created so much value. Do you think about it that way? Or is there, do you have a good lens of that? I try and get people to understand. Like, this isn't just, you know, working at a company.

This is, you know, I think we did the math on how much money per employee YC in theory should drive. And I think we're something like $20-ish million per year per employee in terms of like, you know, sort of market cap value created in the world. 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 sort of, I think it's like close to 100 million per year per employee. So it's pretty wild. Who are the LPs even? Is it like

the pension fund types? It's just like a VC fund? People who invest in VC. 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. We looked at a two-year period from 2018 to 2020 of people who who invested in at least three YC companies per batch for those two years, the top decile predictably was very good. It was like 16x. The top quartile was also very good. It was 8x.

I mean, these are outrageous returns for such a short period of time in venture period. The wild thing, though, is median was 5x, and then the bottom quartile was 3.3x. So it's really crazy because in venture period, if you look at how VCs make money, it's all in the power law. There's only sort of the top 25% make any money at all. And then the top quartile generally for any given year of VC

is only 3x. So it's pretty wild what's happening. You've read, I think I said read something, you've read 6,000 YC applications. So you've seen more of this than anybody else.

You're the admissions officer. You've been in a lot of these interviews. You've then seen the companies grow what do the extreme winners look like early on? And do they look any different than the average company? 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. And, you know, he had never started a company before. 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. 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. So I think it's basically been that same profile, like highly technical people who are just like sort of smart and earn. and that's about it. That's sort of mainly who we like to fund.

And then it's, I think, unusually really, really important today in 2024. I mean, large language models have basically opened everything up. 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. It's, I think, like, really profound moment for all entrepreneurs, period. Yeah, I think me and Sam have both had learned a code on our to-do list for, like, 12 years,

about the, you know, Python the Hardway course on Udeme, did all that shit. I think we met me, now we get to skip the learn-to. It's just code now. You don't have to do the learn-to part. It's like, 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 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. It's not even about no code anymore. I was doing that the other day where I was talking to chat, GBT,

where I was explaining, like, here's the problems my business is having. Can you help me, like, can you just, like, be a therapist with me and help me, like, come up with interesting solutions?

And the answers were shockingly good, by the way. It was like, it was like pretty good at just like brainstorming with me and just being like a sparring partner. Is there a, you know, like,

I know that YC, a lot of it comes down to making people, what people want and things like this. And to me, that's like a bit of an art. where you're more of an artist and a scientist. 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 the likelihood that we build a company that, and I think there's magic to create these like multi-deca unicorns, whatever, but is there a way where you could like use your data and spreadsheet your way to like, well, here's the interesting opportunity. This is going to get to some type of traction and wealth creation with a high rate of certainty. It's conceivable. You know, some of it is like we think someone might do something like

that and it might totally work actually. And then the trickiest thing is like how do you actually get really smart people to come and do that thing? And, you know, I mean, Capitalism Service has been, and I think like Chimoth talked about that and I thought it was very interesting. What did he say? It sounds conceivable. 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. 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. It's literally just talking with us. 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. Like, we own, you know, 7% of the company or like a big seed investor. So we need to sort of be around. And it's very, like, high touch. And you get, like, an individual person. And then I think like the capitalized service idea like is really just, you know, connect your metrics, connect your stripe account, your bank account, your quick books. You know, I mean, it's actually pretty doable today. Like it's conceivable that someone should connect all those things up. And then an L.M can just, you know, rank whether something's real or not, do the diligence. And then if you like hit a certain bar, like, boom, like, here's money

in your bank account. Sam, did you ever see that when they, did that for growth stage companies. I think they called it the eight ball. It was like you, you connect all your data. And then it'll, I don't just tell you, 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. 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? But I thought the results were like, interesting, but not like, maybe too early. Yeah, where it was like, this is interesting.

But do you remember when Chad JPD started getting popular? I think Sean, two years ago. And there was a guy on Twitter, who had a really funny name. It was like Greenpoint or something like that. And he told ChatGBT, GBT, like,

make me a content website that can rank high on search and it can monetize on ads. And I think within like three months, he got it to like $20,000 in monthly revenue. Do you remember that story? Oh, yeah. Like the normal way now is I prompt AI and I want AI to be an agent.

What he did was the opposite. He's like, you tell me what to do. I'll be your human agent. You have the good ideas. You prompt me. And I thought that was like kind of the brilliant. would work extra well now with 01, like the new reasoning model. Gary, can I ask you a question?

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. You were cold-calling companies in the yellow pages trying to get work, and 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? I've never heard that before. Yeah, of course. I mean, let's see.

I mean, my parents, we grew up sometimes food insecure. my dad was a foreman in a machine shop, and my mom was a home health aide and certified nursing assistant at convalescent homes. You work two jobs. And me and my brother lived in apartments in the Bay Area, sort of in the shadow of Silicon Valley. And I guess one of the weirdest 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. So he was always losing his job. And so we were always just like never had money around. And the thing was like he really did invest in computers. Like we had our first computer was a, you know, IBM PCXT. 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.

And I just realized, oh, yeah, like I'm 14, but I, you know how to make web pages. And I started winning some awards. for like web design as a kid in junior high. I started an underground newspaper with my 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.

And the funniest thing was like we had, thousands of people would find it off of Usenet news groups and things. And we'd write articles that, you know, I don't think people knew that we were 14. Like 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. 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. Like an early vice.com. Yeah, basically. Like I think we wrote a, you know, my buddy wrote editorial about, you know, how the Three Strikes Law was bad for California. And, you know, we were like 12 years old. Like, what do we know about any of that stuff? But, you know, on the internet, nobody can tell. And, you know, I think we wrote it in pretty clear English. People couldn't tell that we were that young. And then I feel like I got really addicted to the internet. And then I thought, well, maybe I can make money.

And back then there was a thing called the Yellow Pages that they'd throw on your doorstep, and that's how you would find businesses. And I thought, okay, the Yellow Pages is probably my link to making money somehow. Like if they have a business and they have a little ad in the yellow pages literally in the print section. And this was not so early that the Internet,

had eaten yellow pages yet, but it was late enough that there was an internet section. So I just started cold callings, you know, seeing, hey, like, I know how to make web pages, will anyone hire me? 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. And, you know, basically they paid me, you know, 10 bucks, seven bucks and 10 bucks an hour to work on, I mean, I learned how to do graphic design. I learned HTML. What is that, what's that phone script? Oh, God. Yeah, first you have to deepen your voice, right? You can't be 14 on the call. That's right. And it's like, oh, I'm a web, I'm award-winning web designer and,

you know, but I'm 14. Did you say that? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's funny. I mean, I remember my first boss, he was, this was sort of his like side hustle. So by the way, it's a winning designer in your LinkedIn now? I don't know if it is. That's a mess. That's a miss. That's a miss. It's funny.

I mean, I remember it was like this company called Info Lane. 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. And I think it was one really technical, like sort of neck beard, Unix guy. And then the funny thing was the CEO was also a regional bank manager, I think, at Fremont Bank. 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 invest myself. Like, I'm going to invest my own money.

And he became like the co-founder on this, you know, web design firm in 1994. So it was pretty wild to think of. about, I mean, that's just how you started business. And that was what business was. Like, you didn't go on the internet and apply on a form or something. 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. And at some point, did you just make enough where you were like, mom, dad here, like, I can help or what happened? Yeah. I mean, we, I always lived in apartments growing up. And I had a little brother,

who was eight years younger, and I wanted us to live in, I wanted the American dream. And so, 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. So I'm helping them remodel it right now. That's amazing. By the way, I looked up your old blog. I think back in 2001, you wrote the following, which I think is pretty accurate. You said, you know, blogs are all over the place. It was back in 2001, so over 20 years ago. Pretty soon, we'll all just be writing a blog.

We won't really talk to friends. I have to catch up anymore. Human interaction will just boil down to clicking on someone's name on your favorite website. And that'll be it. No more tedious. How do you do over a nice matchafrappuccino at some pretentious cafe? Just read my blog if you want to know what's up. Oh, my God.

You basically have predicted social media. It wasn't exactly blogging, but that's Instagram stories. That's Facebook. That's the news feed. Exactly. I think you nailed it for better and for worse. That's funny. Man, the one thing I wish I could do is like go back in time and tell myself,

don't sell your time. Like, don't work for a consulting firm or like, you know, get paid $10 an hour. Like, go make products. But did you ever do that? I thought you were pretty young when you first started getting involved with YC. Oh. I was 27, so I was much later, honestly. You looked very young in the photos.

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. And Peter Thiel was like, Peter Thiel was like, hey, quit your job. In fact, I'll pay your whole salary to quit your job and come co-found this new company, this little company we got called Palantir.

Yeah, it's like a $95 billion market cap company today. And you turned them down. What the hell were you thinking? Could you just embarrass yourself here? Of course. I mean, I went to Stanford, computer engineering. I mean, changed my life, obviously. A fraternity brothers of mine, Joe Lonsdon and Stefan Cohen.

Steph and I went to high school together, grew up together, tried to start a bunch of companies together. I was a year out of school. It was 2004. And I thought, like, oh, look at me. I have health insurance. I have a real job. 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, so they're going to go start a company?

I don't know. It's really funny to think about in retrospect. 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 Stefan's list when that happened. 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. It's like, when you start a thing, you know, take an eight and a half 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. And, you know, I guess it was pretty wild.

I mean, Peter was not a billionaire yet. I think the funniest thing about PayPal and the PayPal Mafia is that they basically fought a land war in Asia against eBay. I mean, 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, builder, fighter types to just like gut it out to build a business on someone else's platform. 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. And there was a bunch of them too.

So that got divvied up a bunch. Yeah, is wild. How much was Peter Thiel worth do you think at that conversation? Because like let's say you made $80,000, that's like a big deal, right? To be out to dinner, it's going to be like, I'll give you $80,000 right now just to quit. Yeah, totally. To get a co-founder or co-founding engineer, some of it is like I could see myself doing that today. I mean, I think Peter was probably worth like at least a couple hundred or at least a hundred million at that moment. More than enough to be able to say something like outlandish like that. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a fair trade today. 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 $100 billion in the future. That is a fair.

trade. Did he make a compelling pitch about the company or was he just like, I don't know, this is just like a bet? Did he see the future in that sense of what it became? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the thing I really learned from that moment, I mean, I was 22. I didn't know how the world worked at all. I mean, we had dinner at his French restaurant frisson. I think that's one of the things you do when you, you know, make it to send to millionaires. You do something stupid, like open a restaurant. And I mean, the restaurant was terrible. Like, the suit was really bad. I mean...

He lost, like, millions of dollars on that restaurant, right? I think so. I mean, today it's this really nice steakhouse, but yeah, it was bad. And then, you know, what I should have done, I mean, I was so lacking in social graces. You know, they did the whole pitch. And then I think I said no, like, before

the soup came out, even. And so we were just, like, awkwardly sitting there for the rest of the dinner. And he had actually reaped, he was like, here, like, here's a check, like $70,000. How much a year do you make in Microsoft? Here's $70,000.

Cash this check. I didn't really understand it in the moment. And then I think in retrospect, like sort of 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. 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. You know, I thought, oh, the Wall Street Journal isn't writing about enterprise software. This isn't a hot space.

And so, you know, that was like fundamentally the backward way of thinking. Like, the world doesn't, like, happen to you. 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. like you actually talk to people, like you actually talk to your users. And you sort of gather primary first source information on how the world works. And what they had done was realize 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. I think they went into the security apparatus of like the three-letter agencies in D.C. 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. 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 does like a Silicon Valley? kind of outcast, get a CIA tip.

Yeah, I mean, my inter, I don't know specifically. 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. And the core idea was that they could find these fraud rings just using a graph database, just literally, you know, people make a bunch of fake identities. they send the money from one fake identity to another. And if you're just using SQL or a row-based method, you just couldn't figure it out.

But the second you grafted out, you would find this ring. And what they found was that the three-letter agencies didn't have access to that technology. So what I needed to do was instead of taking my worldview from the media or 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 and my sentiment people.

That's simple, but that's still really hard to like... Oh, yeah. Well, it was smacking me in the face, and I didn't even see it. You had an L6 promotion waiting on you, right? Yeah, yeah, I was trying to make it to level 60, yeah. Level 60 is like hardly L5. It's like level three or something. It's brutal.

And by the way, Palantier. I've got friends that are there, 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. Peter Thiel back then seemed like an obvious winner. But the Palantir idea didn't, like, it seemed like it didn't work for like two years or something like that. 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.

All right. Now it actually has legs, you know, the YC. Traffasaro thing. Like, it seemed like it had those normal, normal, like, issues except for like maybe five years. Yeah, it took many, many years before it started driving revenue and, you know, became real. 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 your own money into it before and sort of wait and be incredibly patient and ignore all the signs that you know, weren't getting revenue and not, you know, actually working for so long to the point that, you know, suddenly it starts.

absolutely working and working like 10 times better than you thought it would. 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 most amazing version of like the second or third startup that people do. Like your first startup, you got to just gut it out sometimes. It's like, how do you like get to your first million dollars, right? Well, that is the name of the podcast. Indeed.

And so I'm curious, what's your advice? or take on that? Like, how did you do it? How did you think about it? And knowing what you know now, how would you go make your first million? Yeah. I mean, what's funny is in the end,

like, Palantir ended up being huge, but it didn't really IPO until many, many years later. I mean, I designed the logo in 2000s. I joined as employee number 10. 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.

but the pizza box would have our Palantir logo that I designed and join the next Google. And people would like eat the pizza and they'd like give us dirty looks. Like how dare you? What the heck is wrong with you guys? And then let's see. 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. I think my first actual million dollars was selling a few million dollars worth of Twitter stock.

at IPO. 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, 95. 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 quit to join Palantir. I was like, it felt. in 2004, I still had like $30,000 in credit card debt and like maybe $50,000 in student loans.

And I just like, I was like, well, like $70,000 is a lot, but you know, how am I going to actually, you know, I don't know if this job will even exist in six or nine months. And like I could be a lifer at Microsoft. And of course, in retrospect, like being a lifer in Microsoft would be sort of like a life of torture at some level. So yeah, my first million was actually Twitter stock. So I started a company in 2008,

called Posterous. It was a blog platform. I used to use it. I love Posterous. Yeah, it was dead simple blogs by email. You just emailed post at Posterous.com. You didn't have to log in or learn how to use software. And then we just reply back with like, here's your blog. Like, here's your website. And, you know, you can 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. A lot of people used it to like share photos with their family. It grew 10x year on year, two years in a row until Instagram came. out. I remember when Instagram came out, Posthrus was actually one of the little checkmarks. Lost of the Sands of Time, I think it was like, you know, Posterous, Tumblr, 4Square, Twitter, and I remember all that sharing page.

And I remember Chris Sacco, one of our investors, emailed us about it. And I was like, hey, what do you think about Instagram? And before I could reply, my co-founder replied, it sucks. And I was like, and we got a one-line reply. it from Saka saying, I'm very disappointed in you guys. And then I just was like, you know, sleep deprived, didn't think about it again. But like I think about that all the time now because, 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. 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. And then Instagram was sort of the first free app that created a network that also, you know,

even had a little bit of utility with their filters, and it was all free. And basically, you know, we got run over by the eventual winner. 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. He was like, Posterous is, you know, way easier to use than Tumblr. And so we sort of made a mistake and took like that competition. and then made it our identity. And it's advice that I have to give to founders all the time now, which is like we weren't competing against Tumblr.

We were competing against how people were getting photos off of their phone, actually. But 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. Tumblr didn't even want to be Tumblr. That ended up having zero enterprise value. I think that's also one of the cool things about Silicon Valley is like you can even sort of screw it up. 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. We easily could have, you know, sort of charged $5 or $10 a month for it.

We would, you know, we were a team of like 12 people. We easily would have been profitable. And then I remember because we were hanging out with our friends at we. like David Risenko and Dan Veltri, who were amazing. I mean, they were, they only ever raised, you know, a tiny amount of money out of Demo Day and never raised a series A. And what do they eventually sell for like $300,400 million? Yeah, to Square like sort of, I think pre-IPO. And then Square, of course, like, went on its crazy run.

So these guys are like made, you know, a hundred times more money than me and my co-founder imposterous. Like, you know, rightly so. 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 press. Like, you know, just play your own game, like make up your own mind. So, you know, if I did it again, like we easily probably could have done that. then instead, I think we ended up pivoting out of, you know, that posthous idea. And we were just wanting to continue to chase this idea that we could be the free social

network. 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. He asked, you know, are you a platform or are you a network? And we said both because, you know, that's what founders who like don't have strong opinions end up saying, I think. It's a multiple choice test. You just circled A&B.

Can't be wrong that way. But I don't know. This is all 2020 hindsight. 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. So it's not just make something people want and raise a series A and B and look like a successful startup. It's actually makes something people want and that's the end in itself. And if you do that, like, you're going to. to make money. And, you know, hopefully you can compound that and, like, you know, create real

enterprise value for yourself. And that's, that's sort of the game. We want to ask you a bunch of questions about different stories, because you probably have a lot of stories. But what's interesting about that story is, 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. So, like, it's a very serious product. 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 quote, less serious. Did you ever, like, I mean, I guess I'm self-projecting because I feel this way sometimes where I'm like, I'm doing something that's not serious. But you kind of have done both and you've done now you're back to a relatively serious thing. It's a YC is a multi-billion dollar company. How do you balance like working on something that seems fun and cool versus like a serious big thing? 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. It's all made up, but you get to make it up.

And then, you know, for posterist and blogging, like they said the same thing about Facebook. And I remember spending time with Boz and, you know, a bunch of our friends who were early Facebookers. They never accepted the frame that Facebook was not a serious and important thing. You know, their narrative was very clear. They had a very strong cult, and the cult was just clearly once every few decades, I think very explicitly Zuck would say this, like once every few decades, like everything would change, media would totally change. And like, they were right.

This social layer came up. And, 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've got to buy eyeball somehow. And guess who's got the monopoly on eyeball? you know, Larry and Sergey and Mark Zuckerberg. You got to go pay, you got to pay the toll to, you know, go across the bridge. Like, you know, the second price auction mechanism in 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. So wait, are you telling all YC founders to go and build an audience online? Oh, if you're doing consumer, you basically have to. do, right? Sometimes even if you're dev tools, like you actually have to. But yeah, would you say the same thing if you're a B2B, like, isn't it even more valuable because you need a smaller, more targeted

audience? Oh, yeah, that'd be great. It's harder to target. That's a pretty interesting thing. You didn't say this. I'm putting words in your mouth. But if you are saying to all the ones. Yeah, we have Mark Tinkas coming to speak at our mini conference later today and, you know, we're going to talk about it. It's like,

how do you actually get incremental customers? And distribution really matters for consumer businesses, but that's also why, you know, we've had a dearth in really break out consumer businesses for 10 years. You know, I think that this will change. I mean, with AI, AI does change things. I don't think it's broken the distribution advantage. You know, I think that the big tech companies have a total stranglehold on the incremental

user and you have to pay them still. I mean, it's just purely market dynamic, right? Like, you know, we're selling widget X or game X or dating site X or whatever it is, But our buddy from college or someone from halfway around the world in Eastern Europe can take what we've done and do the exact same thing or go to our supplier in China and get the same drop shipping relationship. And so at that point, the second price auction means like, well, I want that customer. No, I want that customer.

No, I want that customer. Guess what? It's an auction. Like every incremental dollar that is gross margin, Google or Facebook will just extract because it's a perfect marketplace. And that's just the world we live in right now. And then, you know, I think that the purest form of alpha that exists still is saying interesting, valuable things that, you know, and the YouTube algorithm and the X algorithm

and, you know, to a less extent, like Instagram. I mean, I think TikTok is actually pretty wild. Like, they're just giving away distribution over there, especially for brand new creators. I think meta is probably really dropping the ball on how they're thinking about creators. They just, like, I don't know what's going on over there. It seems like they only want to satisfy the people who are already big, which is not that helpful

for people who are trying to do new things. But yeah, that's sort of the regime we live in. For B2B, what we see at YC is that, you know, probably 70 or 80% of companies are B2B and our most well-attended mini-conference every batch is actually the sales mini-conference. Pete Kazanji founder sales, like that book, we give a copy of that to literally every founder.

A lot of it is about a mindset shift. Most people have never been rejected 95 out of 100 times. It's just so soul-crushing to get that many times in your life. But it's also, you know, for 80, 90% of businesses today, you better get good. If your website conversion rates 5%, you're doing phenomenal, you go out and knock on 100 doors

and get 95 nose, you feel like you're the biggest failure in the world. And it's the same conversion rate. Because you got five. Five enterprise contracts paying you $10,000 to $100,000 a year. Like, you're the biggest winner in the world. Like, that's how this stuff works.

We got to ask you about some of the people that you've been able to meet. I'll tell you what I want, and I hope that you give it to us. I don't know if you will or you want. But like, so me and Sam kind of in 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.

It doesn't matter if you're doing, you know, $10,000 a month or $100,000 or $10 million a month. It doesn't really matter. You wake up every day. And then we all look for kind of like this entertainment inspiration thing. And we get a lot of it from Twitter, from podcasts. 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 handle things or the way that they dealt with a

situation or something about their personality. Of course, it's sort of, you know, a caricature. It's not a perfect picture and, you know, whatever. They're not perfect people. But it is badass to hear those stories. And we hear them about Elon, 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. You've been around the before they were, you know, big and since.

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. It's a long-witted way of saying, can you tell us? me some cool stories about some of these characters that you're running. Yeah, absolutely. The funniest story I remember from working with Paul Graham in the office. I mean, he gave me my first shot as an investor and as an advisor to startups.

I was burnt out for Imposterous. My co-founder and I had like a falling out and he wanted to become Google groups. And I was like, dude, I don't even think that Google wants to be running group groups. Like, we should just charge money. But, yeah, Paul, like, I think really did. like Paul and Jessica basically, like, did all the admissions, work with all the companies. It was like 2011.

You know, even the whole YC campus was not a campus. It was like a warehouse with some carpet and some, like, custom, like, very cheap. I mean, there's just tables and benches. 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, you'd fall over. Like, there's just, like, a bunch of. funny things about YC early.

It was like this tiny thing. And to paint a picture, like people still, when I said I was going to go work at YC as a designer in residence, my friends in venture or startups would say, oh, that's nice. It sounded like I was going to volunteer at like a high school camp. It was like a high school basketball camp or something. I was like, oh, that's nice. That's so, you know, I hope you enjoy that. Good for you.

service. Good for you. Good for you. Exactly. And, you know, Dropbox had happened as a, you know, and it had become a billion-dollar company. But Airbnb, I think, was just about to become a billion-dollar company. And, you know, I think this is lost to the sands of time. But I remember Sarah Lacey had written a book called like One You're Lucky, Two-Yeer Good. So that, you know, 2011, I think was the One-Year-Lucky To Your Good moment for YC, C where people realized,

oh, this isn't like some fringe thing. It's actually starting to churn out like basically the most dominant startups that exist. It's like a very concentrated form of Silicon Valley. And about that time, yeah, there was literally one person who did all the books, all the finances, all the audits, all the CFO stuff. And she needed a copy machine.

So she got one of those like sort of waste height copy machines that, you know, know, look corporate, and it had like these little stickers on it. And then I remember Paul Graham came in. He's like, what is this? Why is this here? And it was like sort of this totem of corporateness. He's like, I remember seeing these at Yahoo and I hated them. He started like scraping off the sticker that had like the phone number of the little company that would maintain the copy machine. and I guess it just jumps out at me as like this very interesting quirk of Paul that was like absolutely right. And, you know, I sort of stay up at night thinking about like, how do I make sure that YC never feels corporate?

PG. He would show up in like shorts and Birkenstocks all, you know, all day. I think he wore khaki pants to my wedding. So my mother, my sister-in-law was like, excuse me, sir, this is a private wedding. And I'm like, no, no, no, that's my boss. So, I mean, there's this, I think what I learned from Paul was that I think there is an insidious nature to, like, formality and corporateness and just, like, having to wear a suit or the convention, right? Like, I think there's incredible value in being very, very unconventional. 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, address code. Or like, what, you know, what are some other examples of this? Like, you know, basically, you should beware about your own formality and try to fight against it. It's just like, try to be super matter of fact. And I think that that's one of the things that just makes companies bad.

I wonder, like, as people who run your own businesses, do you ever think about that? 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? Well, it's the same thing as what you said about the framing thing. You behave like you think you're supposed to behave versus what kind of makes sense. You start playing business a little bit. 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.

you're like, no, dude, I got to make the damn thing. You start making the damn thing and you start getting some customers. And then you kind of go back to playing business again. Which is definitely part of the Silicon Valley thing. You know, like OKRs, measuring things quarterly. 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. But some of it is like useful.

I guess if you're Airbnb, you have, if you have 6,000 employees, you do slow down. 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. I will say that I think it's possible for people to do insane business now with like two pizza teams. Like I think that we, you know, probably in your community or maybe you guys yourselves will end up making these like $100 million to like billion a year businesses that are totally empowered by large language models that like do not need more than 20 people working at them. 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. 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. 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. they can just do the right thing for the customer. And the cost basis will come down a ton. The trickiest thing is like, I'm not sure if it's inflationary or deflationary. Like what's going to happen here, right? Like prices in theory should come down.

Things should get a lot more competitive. I mean, on the flip side, like the hope is that all of our, you know, products and services get a lot better, cheaper, faster, real fast. I mean, this is the moment. Like literally we talk to people who are Eng managers and like CTOs and, like, Like, even engineering teams, I think that it's almost generational. Like, we get, it's like in the water for us right now, because we spend all of our time with like 22, 25, 28-year-olds

who were like the me from, you know, 15 years ago. Like, we're just helping the next generation right now. And they were like born on the internet. They were born with large language models, you know? And then there's sort of, you know, frankly, I'm 43. Like my generation of sea 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's super agile, because you don't have to be doomed to calling in the business process automation call center. You don't have to hire the team in the Philippines anymore. If anything, like, that's one of the more direct advice we give to people looking for startup ideas in the batch right now. If people are pivoting, we're like, okay, well, you're selling to, let's say, like, accounting firms, you know, but you're having trouble with enterprise sales. 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? 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 e-vals and great workflow? 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. It's just like hundreds of them, thousands of them are going

to pop up right now. Just doing that. That's so exciting. What companies are you super excited about that we should watch out for? We should go check out because you live in the future. You're further in the future than we are. Obviously, like, the tooling for this is important.

There's going to be a lot around helping people build the stuff. Evales in particular, like doing it test driven is important. The danger for most founders right now is it's very easy to make demoware that you can use to raise money. And then you're tempted to sort of, you know, quote unquote, raw dog your prompts. Like you will just

write code that has some prompts and you won't write any tests. And then 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. It's important to build your worldview on how the world works directly from customers and their customer data. So the sort of rinse and repeat thing that's maybe 80% of 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 wrote repeating knowledge work and then get

access to their data, get access to the flow of their work, watch how they do it, and then literally write test cases using, and if there's hallucination or the LLMs aren't actually able to consistently do the thing you want, you actually have to chop down the prompts more. Like, you're asking for the LLM to do too much. Like, the LLMs are capable of maybe like 120 IQ level work right now. and if you're giving it too much in the context window and asking it to output too much, it's just like do it in steps, right?

This is literally what 01 and reasoning already does using chain of thoughts. 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 large language models from Anthropic and Open AI and meta are one and then two orders of magnitude

in compute and number of parameters. And then we just get like, the Daru Amadei scaling laws paper specifically says, like, you know, these big large language model AI labs are going to spend a billion and then $10 billion on the next generations. And like if we get like continued 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. And, you know, I think that my hope is that, you know, there's not enough agency in these things. And then, you know, maybe what will happen, 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. And then they already have the revenue and the market captured in some way that they're like sort of beating the software incumbents that they're going up against. They themselves have like tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And then like basically the standard motes apply. Like look at Porter's Five Forces and you're like, you know, you have way better access to data. Your systems are way smarter.

It costs a lot of money to take a risk and switch off. of those systems and then you have a sales force that is way better and smarter. And so if you take all, you know, that's sort of the gambit right now. Like if you do prompts and evals, you're pulling forward the future by a few years. You're trying to like grab as much land as you possibly can right now. And then from there, like hopefully you can hold on and build the next Microsoft or the next Salesforce or the next 10 to $100 billion company. Was it obvious when Sam Altman left YC to do this?

I wish I was smart enough to predict that this was what was going to happen. Did you think that he was going to be the man like he is now? Like, you know, Paul Graham has that essay where he's like, here's five people I bet on. 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. So did you, were you like, whatever Sam does is going to be a generational company? Or were you like, it might be.

It could be mildly successful. I mean, I think it could be. In full transparency, like, I'm going to be super honest. I was like, man, I don't quite get it. You know, when he was sitting in my shoes as president of YC, he'd come back. And I remember sitting in a 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 they were all talking about AI.

And they were sort of talking about these sci-fi scenarios. And I'm like, man, I saw Terminator 2 too, but that was a movie, okay? And I think that I'm changing my tune at this point. I wish that it was smart enough to be, you know, actually totally a believer. I'm a believer now. do I believe that we're going to end up in like a doomsday scenario? Like I still don't really believe that there's that much agency in these things, which is sort of a reason why.

Your judgment now is questionable, you know? First Palleteer now opening. Thank God that you've like already made of so many other successful investments that I know that Gary's got good judgment and like predict the future a little bit because I'll come around eventually, you know, like I'm just a year off. Yeah, yeah. He was Palatier employee 10. After he said no to the Kothon, well, he ended up there, right?

I mean, now we're, you know, we are full believers in large language models. But, you know, I think the thing that's a little bit lost to the sands of time is that, you know, what Sam was absolutely right about was jumping on this thing that the smartest people in the world were already talking about, like eight, nine years ago. And then he built it. You know, he invested the money. He, you know, brought together the people. 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.

You could ask, why didn't Meta do this before? Why didn't Google do this before? Why didn't Microsoft Research do this before? All of those people had virtually limitless access to resources. And to weave this back together, I think there is something really terrible and limiting about giant organizations that are not capable of, evolving and making smart decisions.

I mean, that's what big tech is like. There's sort of like big daycares for the most technical smart people in the world. And it's like, here's, you know, play some volleyball. We'll cook you lunch. Like, 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. Like, what needed to happen was the ability, you know, one of the things that got explained

to me, why. it was Open AI that came up and invested millions first, and then tens of millions and hundreds of millions into the large language model and transformers for language. If you were at Google, you needed to work this bureaucracy. It was highly political. 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 what you would find is that Google would do really breathtakingly amazing work, but then you'd have like 30 different authors. And if you'd read the paper, there'd be like these sort of strange things that seemed 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 the model that you wanted to do.

You had to do some weird things to accommodate people who were going to commit, their training resources for their like random little thing. And so it's funny to see that, you know, human progress is more or less a little bit impeded by the bureaucracy and lack of governance and lack of agency that large organizations just sort of like impose on people. Like you don't have a choice. Isn't it crazy that it was easier for them to invent and discover transformers and this large language of a 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. Like, that should tell you kind of everything you need to know. I mean, the wild thing is, like, even with an open AI, like, they did everything right. Like, GP3 was very impressive. 3.5 was even more. Four was incredible. But, like, they were going to just put it behind an API. And, like, explicitly for many years, OpenAI was supposed to be a, you know, we're a research lab, not a product company.

And, you know, it took the relatively hurt. you lay in efforts by product people inside OpenAI to even release chat GPT, which turned out to be the greatest consumer launch of maybe in the history of consumer launches, actually. Hey, you said, and I know we got to wrap in a second, but you said you keep talking about this thing. It's pretty amazing about talking to the smart people and like, what do they, what are they talking about? You have access to more of those types of people than probably most anyone on Earth. what's the conversation right now? Or is it all AI still? Yeah. I mean, ultimately, that's sort of the number one thing that we're pretty excited about.

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. You know, I would make a pitch that often the best things that could be automated are actually very rote. They're sort of the knowledge worker equivalent of like hand looming a carpet or something. 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. Like can you imagine, you know, millions of people, like tens of millions of people on the planet. Like that's their nine to five, you know? Like that is not a good use of a very smart human being,

generally speaking. And those are sort of the things that are most easily replaced by really great prompting great e-vals. And frankly, I think there are going to be 20-person software engineering

focused startups that basically turn 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. Gary, if you have one minute, can you tell the spoonbending story? I think this is a very powerful story that you have. The spoonbending party, I don't know if you, you know, this is a whole blog post you have. I mean, you know, I've been to Burning Man a few 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, you know, there's a lot of like weird fringe stuff, a lot of like 60s, like esoterror. You're just wandering around the desert on a bike with your buddies. And I think 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 schick was that they were going to teach you how to bend a spoon with your mind. I was like, okay, that's cool. Like, let's go check it out. They passed out these spoons.

And then it was like a magic trick. They said, okay, now bend your spoon with, like, look at your spoon and bend it with your mind. 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. And then basically, I think what you're supposed to do, literally, is just bend the spoon with your hands. 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 because I was like, 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. Just to get it started. Yeah, just to get it started, right?

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? That's absolutely incredible. And I was like, guys, it's a bit. It's a bit. 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. Like, that's literally like the stick, actually.

And it's a little bit of an allegory for bias to action and what you're supposed to do in real life. Like, real life is sort of like this exercise. Like, they say, like, you can go change the world and you can do it with your very ideas. But, like, you know, that alone is not enough. Like, you actually have to go with your hands and go talk to users and, you know, sit and build a thing. And so, you know, don't forget the second half. And the wildest thing is, like, more than half of the room could not do it. And so if you are the person who's able to bend the spoon with your mind,

like guess what? You also used your hands. Like, you got to do that. And actually, like, that's maybe like the greatest gift. It's just like. Dude, Gary, you're the shit, man. You are the best. I love talking to you.

You make me feel really great. You give me energy. And we're very, very, very thankful that you took the time to do this. Thank you guys so much for having me. Always great to see you guys. And congrats on all the success and excited to see where you and your community go. I mean, we're all building the future out here. Well, thank you for saying that.

Take care, Gary. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.