Pirate Wires - Garry Tan Interview: Politics, SF Boom Loop, The Future Of Tech, Lina Khan, and AI

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

This interview was recorded at the Foundation For American Innovation "Reboot" conference. Big thank you to FAI for allowing Mike to interview Garry and for providing us with the video. Please check them out! https://www.thefai.org/ Today, we have special interview with Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator. In this conversation, we discuss Garry's reasoning for becoming politically active, corruption in SF, the future of tech, AI, building San Francisco to be better than ever, big Tech vs. small tech, and Lina Khan Featuring Mike Solana, Garry Tan Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Garry Twitter: https://x.com/garrytan TIMESTAMPS:

I did not consider myself really that much of a political animal at all. How can we have an elected official, the person who's supposed to be the top cop of San Francisco, basically come out and say it's open season on Asian American elders? The people who try to build the housing have to pay off the non-profits like Toddco. This is a grip. This should be illegal. I do not understand why this is possible. You know, all the 20 somethings, all the super cracked engineers, they want to be here because they know the high order bit is here. And so that is the origin of the boom loop. Like we are going to create dozens, if not a hundred companies worth billions of dollars.

companies worth billions of dollars. Man, so I have a lot of questions for you, sir. Gary, you, I feel like the last really of the last four years since 2020, I think the evolution of you in public and in San Francisco has been just inspiring and exciting for me personally, as someone who cares about the city and the technology industry. And really the kind of connection between the two, which is, I think in large part, what I want to talk about with you today. And I just want to start with, there was a media story that I believe was wrong, which was that you were like forcing new Y Combinator, everyone in the new Y Combinator batch to move to San Francisco. My sense of it, and correct me if I'm wrong, was that actually you were just

recommending that strongly? Yeah. Uh, like a strong recommendation. Yes. Forcing is a bit strong. Like do we force anyone to do anything in America anymore? Yeah, exactly. Certainly not in San Francisco. Um, I, uh, I guess a bunch of questions on this one, because it's been a bit since this new not forcing of people into the city. I want to know, is your sense still that San Francisco is the capital of tech and, um, how has the move affected the new batch? Yes. has the move affected the new batch? Yeah. I mean, San Francisco, I think, uh,

right now is sort of brimming with the kind of crazy energy that I can only imagine, uh, you know, what that felt like during the personal computer revolution down in the South Bay, uh, with the homebrew computer club, what's happening is that, uh's happening is that the rocks can talk. Literally, we have taught silicon language and large language models were trained by engineers right here in San Francisco at OpenAI and Anthropic are now empowering a whole new generation of startups that are actually not just making these toy dinky demos that you see on X, but things that are actually creating new jobs, new revenue. So something weird happened even in the past couple of years at YC. The typical company increased their revenue in a matter of 10 weeks by 5x. So in aggregate, all the YC,

we fund about 270 companies every six months. So going on 600 a year. And in aggregate, they went from just under $5 or $6 dollars a year in revenue across all those companies to more than 30 million dollars in a matter of 10 weeks and it's that has like never happened before um it's like the best indicator of like people are actually making real software that actually solves people's problems and those people love those solve problems being solved so much they're paying a lot of money very quickly so i mean this is mostly in the realm of it sounds like artificial intelligence is obviously the the originator of this entire new boom yeah um i'm thinking now about the recent legislation surrounding artificial intelligence uh forwarded by scott weer and i think before we get to that i just want to

i want to go back to the extraction narrative so four years ago uh city is locked down um the industry is leaving the crime is really bad the drugs are really bad now you have these viral the virus sort of mandates um there was a meme that went around that the tech industry was extracting all of the wealth from the city. And at the time I criticized it, I thought that was crazy. I wrote a piece about it, but I also criticized tech. And I said, we should have gotten much more involved. That was the real problem. It was not that we broke the city. It was that we never actually took control of the city in the first place. You've done a lot of work correcting that over the last four years. And I guess just at this point, I'm wondering where you see it in terms of your progress that you've made, just like local politics progress. And then we will

talk about Scott Wiener in a second. Yeah. I mean, let's see. I did not consider myself really that much of a political animal at all until really when COVID happened, I started seeing basically elders in my community being stabbed, robbed, pushed down. uh vicha ratanapakti was a uh you know thai man in his 70s who was killed on the streets of san francisco and uh i saw the reaction from the da at the time uh this man named chesa budin um you know son of someone just make a fart noise i thought i heard that i mean this is someone who literally said you know know what, that was a temper tantrum. I want to let this person out. I mean, in so many words, like he did not take crime against our community seriously. And I looked at the numbers. San Francisco is 30% Asian American.

The voter base is 20 to 25% Asian American. And yet, how could we have an elected official, you know, really say openly that, you know what, I don't really, I don't care. Like they don't, you know, it's like that Kanye West moment where it's like, you know, like so-and-so didn't care about black people. It's like, how can we have an elected official, the person who's supposed to be the top cop of San Francisco, basically come out and say it's open season on Asian American elders. And I got angry. I just couldn't believe that this was the deal. And actually, I think we were on a clubhouse with him. And he was an incredible sophist.

I'd been drinking. I was in Miami at the time. I was just vibing. It was the clubhouse, the clubhouse heydays. Nothing had been serious at that point. All the conversations were very casual. And I was just doing a primer on local politics, just how it worked. Who was your supervisor? Which the average person in SF that I talked to did not know. And Chesa Bowden just showed up. I was like, oh no, I have to take this seriously now. But he did log off the second Bology came on, which was hilarious, of course. I'm not doing this. Yeah. So there are levels to this game, I guess. Well, you got involved. And you did a lot. I mean, not only did you galvanize tech,

but you put money into this. You are a big supporter of GrowSF. On the extraction, the thing that... So the reason I'm linking it back to extraction is because obviously wealth is not extracted from San Francisco if we leave. And the wealth wasn't here. We weren't mining. Tech people didn't come here and mine it. They weren't mining microcode or something like gold. They weren't striking oil.

They themselves were the value. They brought people from all over the country, brought the value to the region, and created the value. 50% immigrants, honestly. Yes. People from around the world. We are literally brain draining the smartest people from all the way around the world. And then they come here and they create billions or tens of billions, sometimes hundreds of billions of dollars worth of GDP, and they create thousands of jobs. So that doesn't sound like extraction to me. I'm pretty sure it's not.

Right. It's creation and it was being driven away by policy. Now, Scott Weiner was sort of seen as one of the moderates. He was supported by all of the YIMBY people. He's obviously supported by Dustin Moskowitz and I think Open Philanthropy. I don't actually, you know what? I shouldn't say. I don't know that part for sure. But his AI regulation feels a bit like he thinks San Francisco has some kind of claim over it, whereas I don't necessarily think that's true. I think people are here working on it and could easily leave. What do you make of Scott's AI regulation? Do you think that there is a risk that the sort of exciting moment that we were just talking about could end? And then what do you make of Scott specifically?

I think the wild thing is there is sort of a meme out there around AI safety that there are probably some real risks. I mean, everyone sort of walks around and say, what's your P doom. And then the tricky thing, I think what Scott Wiener figured out was that the, this topic in particular is a little bit the, you know, the, I think he came out and actually said this, that it's, you know, the jets versus the sharks. And in this case,

like he didn't realize that and he, you know, sort of ran out and started supporting the Jets real fast. So I don't know if he would have done the same thing. I can't speak for him. But I think he did realize there's a lot more nuance to the debate than not. Personally, I think it's really important for us to maintain the ability of open markets, of open source, of people actually being able to get lots of choice about large language models. There was a moment maybe two years ago that we were sort of worried that it was possible that

a big tech situation could spring up again with access to the world's best models. And that might have been sort of ensconced by really, really overzealous AI regulation that would basically be like the thing that we see in America over and over again. A new industry pops up, and then sooner or later, there's a regulatory capture. And that was a real thing that we were worried about back then. We're thankfully less worried simply because there is open source. We fund thousands of companies who actually need access and they need choices. And so in the broader debate, being able to maintain access to great LLMs is sort of the same thing as being able to access APIs. The whole innovation economy is sort of enabled by open standards and open source.

And that's really the big danger, I think, when you have regulation, especially at a local level. I actually think that the Biden EO, it was not that bad. And actually, maybe that was the correct level at which this type of regulation should happen. And the number one thing that I'm really worried about is, you know, this is a powerful technology. It's like they invented cars. These are bicycles for the mind. These are self-driving cars for the mind. And, you know, do we prosecute the people who create cars? You know, that would really sort of hamper society. Actually, no, we regulate and we're very careful about what people use cars for. And we hold the people who

misuse cars, we hold them responsible. And that's really what I hope happens with this whole topic. So the new bill that's, I mean, it just passed. It's about to be signed or not rejected by Newsom. We'll see. Um, it does seem to be targeting open source a little. I mean, it, it,

it feels good for companies like open AI and, and bad for an upstart trying to compete with open AI. Um, I mean, do you have any behind the scenes political whisperings you can share with us? I mean, I hope Newsom doesn't sign it. I hope he vetoes it. I have no inside knowledge beyond that. But I genuinely hope he does because if we want California to continue to be this magnet for the best talent in the world. We don't pass things like this. I want to talk a little bit about the doom loop versus the boom loop. So you guys do, you specifically, and I think you're just sort of the Y Combinator gang online does a lot of

memeing, a lot of like boom loop memeing, a lot of founder mode. I like the meme that you guys do. Anyway, we'll talk. I'm not going to get into founder mode, but it's a great meme. So is San Francisco dying? Is it thriving? Are the brighter days ahead of us? Obviously, you and I both have criticized the city governance a lot, but I think both have... Clearly, you grew up here and certainly me. I have a lot of love for the city. Downtown seems worse than it was four years ago, right? It's like totally gutted. Other than AI, which now possibly there's legislation putting it at risk, things feel

a little bit diminished here. What are the signs for boom loop optimism? And then i want to talk about the power of the memes and why you do what you do with that of course um i'm pretty bullish uh you know it was in a bad state i think three or four years ago um you know san francisco has a 14 billion dollar budget every other day even like even right now we're starting to see that um you know there's sort of an outsource of state capacity and then unfortunately if you trace the money that money goes to non-profits that are uh you know spending money not to actually serve the people but to enrich themselves and you know sometimes used for political purposes to

ensconce i mean it is its own form of capture. I mean, if you spot, if you look at every major issue in San Francisco or most parts of California, you'll see the same thing, actually. Why can't we build, for instance? It's because we prevent people from building even things that have 30 or 50% affordable housing

because the people who try to build the housing have to pay off the nonprofits like Todd Coe. And if we were looking at this, if this were a New York Times article about a third world country, you wouldn't be surprised, but we should be surprised. We should expect more. This is a grift. This should be illegal. I do not understand why this is possible that you can have a sitting supervisor in the city say, oh, this is a real project. There was a developer trying to make 30% affordable housing on a Nordstrom parking lot. And a sitting supervisor said, oh, I don't know why we're even here talking about this.

You know, what they needed to do was go talk to, you know, John Elberling at Todd Co and pay him off or work out a deal. And then this thing would be built. And I'm like, that's corruption. Like that is not actually should not be legal. And so when you wonder like, why is rent so high? Why, why are there all these problems in the city? Like if you dig a little bit, it's a lack of state capacity. And it is, you know, we tolerate, you know, it feels little. Like, we spend so much, it's incredible how much time we spend thinking about, like, the big national issue. And then we totally neglect what's going on in our very backyard.

And these are elections that are won or lost by dozens of votes, maybe 100 votes. And they go on to, you know, apology actually has a great line about this, where, you know, they're talking about billionaires, but there are 11 supervisors, each of whom, if you divide the $14 billion budget out, like they're responsible for way more than a billion dollars in government spend. And it goes to their cronies their non-profit friends you know the non-profits take their workers and go work on their campaigns like it is an entire loop and that is in a nutshell i think the doom loop like we are literally ensconced in this moment where the the government funds are actually being spent on things that you know do not serve the people that only ensconce the existing uh politicians

in there and then if we're not paying attention then it just continues it gets worse and worse the budget keeps going up we keep passing more and more taxes. On the political scale, I'm actually fine with the taxes. What I'm not okay with is for us to spend billions of dollars to not serve the people. So it was like that four years ago. Maybe a little bit worse because folks like Chessa were still in power. But you did have the Chessa recall. You did have the Board of Education recall. There were some victories in a regular November election on the sort of moderate side for the supervisors. And I mean, things still seem, you just said that's the doom loop, right? Like the doom loops does still seem to sort of exist. Um, Oh yeah, they're still in power. Sorry

guys. So what, what are the signs for optimism? How do we get to... I mean, you guys haven't seen it, but Gary produces these crazy AI-generated, beautiful future San Francisco vistas with Boomloop on there, a self-driving car, and the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. And it's very happy. And I think, honestly, the kind of imagery we need. But what do we need to get there?

How are we going to get there? What are the signs of hope for the boom? I mean, the hope at the end of the day, I think, is still technology. It's founders. It's people working in tech. I'm hopeful and thankful for people to continue to come to San Francisco despite all the problems. And the reason why people do it is the money's here. The talent is here.

And I mean, okay, let me like talk about YC for just a moment. The reason why I push people to be in San Francisco, and we all want it to happen is because literally the rate of unicorns is twice as much. If you've based your company in San Francisco or the Bay Area, it literally is the high order bit. It is the one thing that will double your odds of being a successful billion-dollar company. And this is just basic agglomeration effects. If you have all the people, most people from the rest of the... We have to appreciate this about San Francisco. If you come here and you earnestly want to solve a problem using technology you have five you know you're in a cafe half of the people three-quarters of the other people in that cafe are going to be

like that's awesome in fact i want to help you and if you go to any other cafe in almost any other part of the world they're going to be like sorry, you don't have a real job, do you? And they'll back away slowly. And it's like, that is incredibly special. This is something that has been happening in the Bay Area for decades. And then now because of the AI boom, the LLMs were literally birthed right here in San Francisco. All the 20-somethings, all the super cracked engineers, they want to be here because they know the high order bit is here. And so that is the origin of the boom loop. We are going to create dozens, if not 100 companies worth billions of dollars. And they're going to fill all the office towers.

They're going to fill all the apartments. But we have to build enough of them for them. That's all exciting. But that's clearly not enough to save the city, right? We lived through a massive boom on the company side and it all kind of came crashing down in 2020 because tech was not involved. What I'm wondering is, do you see more people in tech, in the new YC batches, involved in local politics and how are they thinking about it are they getting more engaged because when i moved 14 years ago no engagement um and i and i hope

it's changing i'm wondering if you see signs of that it's i mean it's definitely getting there i mean uh there are lots of people who are who absolutely love san francisco and we're working together to try and fight for this i mean chris larson mike morris there's so many people who you know they already earned like what's funny is the founders actually are a little bit premature together to try and fight for this. I mean, Chris Larson, Mike Moritz, there's so many people who, you know, they already earned, like, what's funny is the founders actually are a little bit premature. They come to me and they say, like, well, I'm here, what can I do? And I'm like, A, you should vote, B, you should join GrowSF, or Together, or like Stop Crime SF, like, go find people, just go spend your time. I mean, it's in AI, and in civic engagement, your time. I mean, it's in AI and in civic engagement, attention is all you need. And so,

I actually think that that's a really important part. Like, all we have to do is at dinner, when something happens, talk about it, and then don't go skin deep. Don't take what the Chronicle has to say. Like, dig a little bit deeper. And if you work through these local political groups, you're going to meet literally the person who works in the city who will tell you, oh, that's corrupt and rotten out because of this. And then when you find out, put it out there, tweet it, make an ex-post. I will repost you. Earlier, we were talking with Francis Fukuyama about this idea of how media is shifting. And what I realized is that's actually what individuals are like. We root, like all the institutions are a little bit ruined and all of the trust has now been atomized down to the level of the individual.

That's why, you know, it's sub stack or it's, uh, you know, your individual writers, right? Like there's a new, luckily there's like new voices and new like pirate wires is a great example of like there's new atomization right and um that's what it takes actually attention is all you need and that if we do not pay attention if we don't actually talk about what's really going on uh there's no one else who's going to do it and then we're just going to read this dumb voter card and we're going to you know we're going to read the pissed off voter, you know, the pissed off voter guide. Yeah, run by the people who've run the city into the ground. Exactly. And, you know, that's sort of how we got here. It's like low information voters, not caring about the local individual issues. And the good news is, it doesn't take a lot, like just pay attention. You know, You don't have to be as mad as I am. You can just,

when November comes around, let's read the Grow SF guide. If you're in these groups, the United Democratic Club is a fantastic democratic club that anyone who lives in San Francisco can join. And if you go to those events, you will understand what is actually going on in the city. And your vote and your work in those organizations, it moves hundreds, if not thousands of votes. I think this November, we were actually pretty much on deck to retake the Board of Supervisors and have a moderate mayor in the city. And that has not happened in many, many years. Which mayor do you think is going to win?

It's like the Game of Thrones. There are like 15 different moderate democratic mayors who are running. I mean, there's Farrell, there's Breed, there's Lurie. I encourage you to go and get to know each of them and their platforms. And I think Farrell and Breed personally are like who I really like.

If you look, I mean, this is a tricky thing. Once again, you can look into people's teams and what nonprofits they're associated with. I think Lurie himself is fantastic. I think he has, as a spokesperson, Max Zabo, who was the biggest Chasers supporter. And I'm like, if you have people like that on your closest team, I do not trust this person. I do not. You have to hold people to account. And when you have policies that hurt Asian elders, I can't abide by people like that.

You, a little bit earlier, were talking about the atomization of media. talking about the atomization of media. And in this, obviously, there are new voices who are professional writers or publications, sub stacks. We've also seen the rise of the shitposting gods of tech, I call them. Elon obviously is the greatest embodiment of this. And then you have a whole cast of characters below them. I've seen Ryan Peterson, the CEO of Flexport, talking about shipping. characters below them. I've seen Ryan Peterson, the CEO of Flexport, talking about shipping.

I mean, this man literally got on a boat and sailed out to where the shipping... So there was back during the supply chain crisis. He went and explored it on a boat. This is in Long Beach, right? Yes. And he explained to everybody what was going on. You have been talking relentlessly on local politics and what it means for tech. So we're seeing the rise of these... I guess you are a media personality in addition to the president and CEO of Y Combinator. Two questions here. I guess the first one is just, where do you see this trend going? Do you see more people getting into it? Are we at a local maximum here? And then two, what do you say to founders who maybe feel like they need to express something about their industry or their company, but they just aren't good at this? I think it's remarkable when you go back into tech and you start diving into the stories of the dawn of the biggest tech companies 10 or 15 years ago. And they all kind of started with PR. It sort of started with, how do I actually get my story out? Brian Chesky would come up with 10,000 different hilarious lines to get reporters

and TV news anchors and all these stories about Airbnb early. It was very important to get PR and press back then. And then the wild thing now with the atomization is that you look at some of the organic views on X of some of the biggest, oldest names out there, and there's no engagement. People aren't clicking favorite on that thing. They're not actually reposting these things. There are no comments on that. They're all on authentic people talking about their direct experience. And so I actually think that we're going to have a lot more of that. And that's probably a good thing. Like, you know, what if this is what democracy actually really does look like? And, you know, you have to pick carefully who you follow and, you know, why and, you know, authenticity and being true to yourself and not lying to your audience. I think that

that is media. The mantle has been passed and the responsibility is the same responsibility that we used to hold the institutions to in the past. So are you encouraging young founders to do more of this immediately, sort of going direct immediately? I mean, I think so. And then the danger is like keep the main quest the main quest yeah and the side quest the side quest so which i also you know struggle with and also find like it's possible to you know politics and media easily can be the side quest and then you know i'm always trying to make sure like my main duty is to y combinator and to founders who go through that program. Because again, how does the boom loop happen?

If Y Combinator is actually doing a great job with founders, and there are dozens of billion-dollar companies that come out, the main quest is the most important thing. To defend your side quest a little bit, what we saw in 2020 was all of your work in tech, all of our work in tech, every investor's work, every founder's work was put in jeopardy because that side quest was totally ignored. You came to a place where there was an exodus of talent and people were leaving. They didn't feel they had a future in the city anymore. It was really bad. People forget how fucking bleak it was in 2020 in the summer when you were locking your house. And the office towers were still

empty. Rioting was looting was legalized across union square we're watching footage of it just getting sacked and like you don't even you can't even call the cops when your house is broken in like you had to get involved so there is a i believe it seems pretty obviously a significant link there and and is important work yeah i mean i feel um if, because we're telling people, you really should, well, try to be successful by actually being in San Francisco. The match paired to that is we do need to build enough housing. We do, you know, a lot of founders and or their workers, like they all want to have kids. And, you know, how can you send your kids to public school and live in San Francisco if they don't teach algebra in eighth grade? Like only 10% of children in eighth grade for this year

will be allowed to take algebra. Yeah, they're not going to teach algebra, but they will rename that Lincoln High School because Lincoln is racist. That was the priority in 2020. I want to talk about the boom loop. Oh, not the boom loop. I'm sorry.

Big tech versus little tech. We only have about 10 minutes left. I want to get to it. So a couple of years ago, you coined the phrase little tech. That has become very much in vogue, the war between the big and the little. It's pretty, I would say, an interesting kind of contrarian take. There is a knee-jerk reaction among people in business to defend business. I share that impulse myself. You've kind of drawn a distinction between the two camps. First, can you just kind of define the two camps for me? And then I'm going to ask you about Lina Kahn. Yeah, of course. I mean, this morning, me and my team and my other partners at YC, we're sitting down with minority leader Hakeem Jeffries. And he's on his tour of California and Silicon Valley in particular.

And I really needed to make sure that he knew. Little tech is what we're trying to do. Like two or three people, half of whom are immigrants. They're coming from around the world. We're literally brain draining the 150 IQ people who know AI from all around the world. And we're trying to concentrate them in America to make America as exceptional as possible. And these are, you know, two or three people who in five or 10 years might have $100 billion company like Airbnb. And that's literally, you know, that is little tech, we need to protect that. We need to make that happen. And that stands in sort of stark contrast to big tech, which is the Apples and the Metas and sort of the giant tech companies of our time, which are basically in manager mode. We are trying to protect founder mode. And it's funny because this idea of founder mode is essentially about very small sets of people having very high agency, I am going to create tech for a billion

people. And that's good for society. I was trying to explain to the leader that like, you know, concentration of power is bad. Lack of competition is bad. Self-preferencing is bad. And the concrete example I gave him was, who here uses the iPhone? Raise your hand. And then who here uses Siri? Only like three of you or something. And why is that? It's because, and you know, large language models have been around for years. Like we know that the worst technology has been ensconced in, you know, basically self-preferencing. And so this, you know, there is a direct link between what kind of world do we want

to live in and who is building those things and what mode are they in? Are they in manager mode where it's just about the mode? It's just about making money, right? I am also a capitalist. I am capitalist with a capital C. It's in the definition of my job. But what I want is little tech to have a chance and a voice and what that translates into is actually better products like our we will actually pull forward society and humanity through technology if there are open markets open source and open uh ability for new startups two or three people with just an idea sitting in a garage to become the next Apple. I don't want one Steve Jobs every 50 years. I think that America can and should have

50 Steve Jobs, one every single year. And what that takes is little tech. We have to invest in little tech. So this brings me to Lina Khan. You guys had her speak at Y Combinator, a colleague of yours yesterday. This was barely on my radar, actually, until last night at dinner when one of your colleagues was like, so where are you on the question of, is Lena Kahn based, secretly based? And I was like, wait, what? Not based. I'm not on that side of things. didn't realize maybe the strange bedfellow the extent to which the strange bedfellow thing was happening obviously Lena can be seen as a champion of preserving competition or something some recent things that have come out of the Lena Khan FCC today and Nvidia is denying this but there was their claims of an investigation obviously the Blizzard Microsoft merger was botched. Nvidia, ARM, we have Apple meta meddling, kind of whatever. The one that alarms me the most is it was never actually investigated. But speaking of founder mode, we have Elon Musk and we have

Twitter. They sort of quite aggressively demanded all sorts of information during that merger, and they were really worried about it. And that leads me to, I think, what really worries me about Lina Khan. She wrote in 2017, the... What was it called? The Amazon Paradox. The Amazon... It was a 2017 essay on how she sees the role of antitrust. And she talked about preserving democracy, not just consumer harm, she talked about preserving democracy, not just consumer harm, not even just preserving competition, but protecting democracy and democratic norms. So that says to me that you have a fount of power trying to preserve power, not necessarily trying to preserve competition. And I wonder, are you at all worried that

she's not on your side? And she's not really on the side of little tech, but she's on the side of government. I mean, I guess I'm not familiar with that particular thing. On the other hand, we've sat down with her. We've hosted her many times. She even came right before Scott Wiener was presenting at one of our events about AI. was presenting at one of our events about AI. And he sort of got eviscerated by 100 of our founders about why are you doing this to us? Right before that, she actually came out very strongly in favor of open source AI. In my conversations with her, she and I are very

aligned on this idea of like, how do we make a thousand flowers bloom? And that does mean open markets, open source. You know, I want to throw in Canter, Jonathan Canter and DOJ, you know, doing a pretty bang up job of trying to point out things like the Siri thing, or, you know, why is it that Apple Pay was self-preferencing over the course of many years for tap-to-pay. And those are things that startups could have done, could have provided choice. And only recently after Cantor sued Apple did they open up tap-to-pay. And they're going to be an early...

Apple has only recently decided, oh, yeah, we maybe should open up Apple Pay. That's a bad look for us. So I think that there is a role for government to try to open these markets and allow tiny startups to actually even get a chance at surviving. These are companies that, without a pathway to getting users or getting access to APIs or getting access to open source LLMs. They can't raise money. No investor will invest in them. They can't get revenue, and they will die on the vine. And we will be stuck with seven $1 trillion companies. There will be seven $10 trillion companies that will all be in manager mode, totally keeping you in...

Imagine how annoyed you are about Siri. Think about that in your entire digital lives. companies that will all be in manager mode, totally keeping you in, like, imagine, you know, how annoyed you are about Siri. Think about that in your entire digital lives. And like, these are technologies that are only going to be more and more present and powerful in how we do everything. Like, I think that that's a dangerous thing. So, I don't know about democracy, but I know that I don't want to live in a world where new founders with an idea who are, you know, they might be young, they're very technical, they're probably autists, they're very cracked, you know, they want to create the future. I want them to do it. I want them to be able to do it. I think that it's really hard to defend Apple and Google. Okay, I'm not going to do it here.

really hard to defend Apple and Google. Okay, I'm not going to do it here. What I worry about is like, what does Lena Khan consider Elon Musk? Does she consider him little tech or big tech? And if she considers him big tech, that's a huge problem, not just for me, but I think for democracy, the democracy she wants to save because she sees herself. And maybe we don't have to talk about it. You haven't read the essay. It seems that there's a conflict maybe fundamentally between government, a fount of power and every emerging fount of power. Tech business generally and tech business specifically is a real counterweight against government. And while it could benefit these little guys today, it seems like we're now kind of slightly in bed with what will be their future assassin. Eventually, if they succeed, they will be

staring down the barrel of Lena's gun. I mean, I guess maybe the sense is they should be at that point. They'll be too big and we need to preserve competition. Is that roughly just like the competition is the good there? I mean, it might be the circle of life. like roughly just like the competition is the good there? I mean, it might be the circle of life. Okay. I mean, that's sort of the problem is like anything, you know, these are great companies.

Like there's nothing wrong with, I mean, we should, we celebrate them. Like these are incredible companies and they are, you know, also a part of an important technology landscape. I mean, literally like these are the biggest and best companies in the world, and we're really proud that they're American companies, actually. But at the same time, like, we shouldn't, like, strangle the next generation. Like, I think it's, we shouldn't allow these successful companies to, like,

sort of strangle the next generation the way that I think they are now. And, you know, I think the most profound version of this is actually the consent decree against Microsoft. The consent decree did change the way Microsoft was approaching Internet Explorer. It allowed Chrome to happen and it allowed Google and Alphabet to actually thrive and become another trillion know, another trillion dollar company. And that I think was a good thing. And so that's my argument to you is like, no, we do not want to, and you know, I personally am worried about a pot, you know, a sort of

government that does not apply laws equally to all players, like perhaps what might be happening with Yuan. I think that's highly problematic. But I think that we do want the next billion-dollar company. We want the next Decacorn. We want the next HectorCorn. We want the next trillion-dollar company. And there is a role for government to play. Last very quick question as we are winding down. I wonder, obviously, AI, huge bright spot in tech. You are on the front lines of all the new things that are happening. What beyond AI, if anything, are you excited about right now? Oh, well, YC did just fund its first cruise missile company.

Okay, let's go. Missiles. Well, I mean, honestly, thanks to Founders Fund for sort of leading the way and creating Andro. What an incredible company. I mean, I think that the pendulum is swinging, and I think that's a good thing. You know, it is important for us to invest into all forms of technology. And, you know, that's not just for defense tech. Like, we also do a lot of climate tech. We're interested in, you know, continuing to invest into healthcare and digital health. There's a lot of climate tech um we're interested in you know continuing to invest

into health care and digital health there's a lot to be done and like honestly it's not just like correct software engineers it's correct engineers of any kind of scientists of any sort who should they should be able to have uh access to capital they should have access to markets and then they should get access to a community of people who will actually help them. And that's San Francisco. That's Y Combinator. That's San Francisco.

We want safety. We want our kids to be able to learn algebra. It's just... We want housing. I want a giant statue on Alcatraz Island. I want a Colossus. I'm sorry, I forgot. The last question is actually just when are you running for mayor? Oh, never.

Or 20 years from now. It's 20 years from now it is. Thank you so much. This is awesome. Thank you guys.