The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 36: Alexis Ohanian on Y Combinator, Getting Punched, and Picking Winners

Episode Date: October 9, 2014

Alexis Ohanian is best known for being: - On the Forbes "30 under 30" list multiple times (then he turned 30)- A co-founder of reddit and hipmunk- In the very first class of Y Combinator, arguably the world's most selective startup "accelerator" (bootcamp)- Investor or advisor to more than 100 startups- A newly minted parter at Y Combinator- An activist related to SOPA/PIPA, etc.Enjoy! Tim***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, Wookiees and Mogwais. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm whispering due to two factors. Number one, I'm in an airport and I'm trying to avoid having people heckle me or other issues. Number two, I've had way too much caffeine. So I'll try to keep this short. Number one, this episode is brought to you by the Tim Ferriss Book Club. I read, let's call it two to four books a week. Typically out of all of those books over the years, I've highlighted four to six of them that had a huge impact on my life. You can get samples of all of them at audible.com forward slash Tim's books.

That's audible.com forward slash Tim's books. And if you'd like a chance to go with me on a private jet to Necker Island. This is the private island of Richard Branson. To spend a week with Richard Branson, with me, with Damon John of Shark Tank, and founder of FUBU, Marie Forleo. Let's see here. Seth Godin will also be there. If you want to spend a week learning lots, there might be some debauchery. You never know.

On Necker Island, you can do it and have all of your expenses paid. Check out shopify.com forward slash Tim. That's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y.com forward slash Tim. And now onto our guest. My guest is Alexis Ohanian. And Alexis is best known perhaps as the co-founder of the social news site Reddit. It is massive, as you probably know. Hitmonk, he was in the first ever Y Combinator class. Y Combinator is the best known startup accelerator in the world. Its selectivity is something like combining Harvard with the Navy SEALs. Very hard to get into. Stars that have come out of that include Reddit, Dropbox, and many, many others. He is now a Y Combinator or YC partner. And we're going to talk a bit about that. And here we go. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'll try to keep this.

You know what? I'm not going to stop this recording. I'm going to keep going because they never shut up in the airport. So I not going to stop this recording. I'm going to keep going. Because they never shut up in the airport. So, I'm going to take a moment. And I'm going to let you listen to some of this. I like this. It's very cinema verite. Okay, you know what? I'm going to keep going. Fuck it.

So, Alexis has a lot of stories. I ask him a lot of weird questions, like when is the last time he punched someone in the face? Or got punched in the face. And we digress all over the place. We talk about how to spot the next big company, how he chooses companies. We talk about favorite books. We talk about documentaries. We talk about everything.

So, without further ado, I would like you to meet Alexis Ohanian. Thanks for listening. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. Thank you for listening. This episode, we have a spectacular, charming, and altogether handsome guest named Alexis Einion. How are you, buddy? It's good to have you on. I'm doing really well. Yeah, doing very well. Very happy to be here. Thank you, Tim. Of course. And you are in NYC at the moment? I should be. I should be, but I'm actually in Los Angeles. What are you doing in Los Angeles? I'm cheating on Brooklyn. Don't tell her, uh, you know, catching up, catching up with

some friends. My grandpa lives here. He is a 92 years young and, uh, want to spend a little time with him and then doing some press stuff. Got it. Love it like this. Well, hopefully this will be the highlight of your LA trip. Oh yes. Well, it's a shame. It's a shame we're doing this remotely though. Yeah. Well we can, it makes me feel taller when I'm not standing next to you or even seated next to you. You have a very majestic torso. It makes me feel healthier not having to sit next to you. This morning, seriously, I was like, I'm going to do some push-ups this morning. Nope.

No. I went for some coffee instead. Didn't happen. Wait, real talk. This is totally random, but you said I could ask you questions. Yeah. Is there anything you've learned since 4-Hour Body that if you were to do the addendum or the quick update, because I'm forever a human guinea pig, when it comes down to it, have you learned anything particularly new that you would add for readers of 4-Hour Body that they

should be doing physically in order to be as efficiently healthy as possible? I think there would be a few addenda I would add. The first would be on smart drugs, and it would actually be a cautionary tale more than a prescription for smart drug use. I would also outline the point that sort of Cartesian separation of mind and body is very artificial. And if you do a lot of things intended to improve physical performance or that are associated with that, whether that's dietary, say elimination of starches and gluten or taking care of your microbiome. So really looking at the sort of bacterial balance or not even balance, but composition of not just gut, but skin flora, for instance, which I've become very fascinated by, you'll improve

your mental performance. And related to that, I would probably delve into different types of fasting, which I skim the surface of, as well as a couple of other sort of fringe topics that I've become very, very fascinated by. So it's funny you should mention that. I'm actually thinking of doing an updated version of the 4-Hour Body with case studies, as well as a few additional chapters on areas that I think are worth exploring. But I think as a side note, that push-ups are very, very underrated. I think that if you were to just take a few variations of the plank pushups in different ranges of motion and you had a, say, three to four foot dowel that you could put across

two chairs so that you could lay on your back and do basically reverse rows like bodyweight rows, that's all you need along with, with say pistols or split squats to stay in fantastic shape when you're on the road. You really don't need anything else. Really? I could get cut up? I think, well, getting cut up has more to do with diet. Yeah. I'd say you add muscle in the gym, you lose fat in the kitchen or when you choose what you eat. So that's definitely a major piece of the puzzle. So one of the things I've been trying and it's still early and I don't know if I'm ready to start promoting this, but it's the waffle diet. I can see a large market for that.

Yeah. And I tell you, man, I haven't quite seen the results I've been looking for, but it makes me happy every time I do it. There's a twinge of remorse. It's the happiness diet. But yeah. I like this. I like this. You could sell a book. I'll take you.

I'll shop you. I'll shop your waffle diet. I will gladly take a portion of that. So for those people who may not be familiar with your background, the first thing I'm going to say is Google is your friend. And we've spent time together before. I would really like to explore certain aspects of you and your experience and your projects that perhaps haven't been covered before. Because of course, you have sort of the early days of Reddit, Hipmunk, publishing, being part of the first class of Y Combinator, now being a partner at Y Combinator,

the huge bus tour, I guess it was 200 events for Without Your Permission, your book, internet activism for SOPA, PIPA, net neutrality, etc. The list goes on and on and on, including 100 plus startups or so that you've invested in, including at least the very partial list, obviously, Secret, Instacart, Coinbase, Zenefits, Teespring, etc. A lot of those areas have been covered in many fantastic interviews and articles, and I don't want to replicate those. But I would like to dig into how you operate and some of what has allowed you or helped you to do what you've done. And so the first question I'd love to ask you is one I often ask, but that is when you think of the word successful, who's the first person that comes to mind? Hmm.

Oh, wow. This one. All right. So this is something that has changed and has evolved over the years. You know, at a baseline, I really, this is so cheesy. At a baseline, though, I think of my own parents for whom success was measured primarily by having a happy, loving, awesome family. And I'm the product of all of that like Oprah and Jay-Z because if you consider this spectrum of, let's just say, business success, you've got to look at where you start on the spectrum and where you're at on the spectrum when you sort of finish.

And obviously, they're not finished, but where they've arrived at this point. And simply because of a life lottery ticket, my starting point on that spectrum was a lot further along than Jay's and Oprah's for all kinds of systemic reasons, frankly, beyond any of our controls. And that doesn't make my success any less cool. I'm very happy with it. But when I look at the entire scope of it, I have to be in awe and be like, holy shit, that's next level success. And then when I think of philanthropy, I mean, you got to think of folks like Gates and Buffett for just being able to say that they're going to take this tremendous amount of wealth and in their life, especially Gates, become so, so active about finding

brilliant ways to use it to make the world suck less. So it's a spectrum of it. But those are the people who I really look to and think like, if only, like that is a place to strive toward for me. If we were looking at the opposite end of the spectrum, what are some of the things that you fear? And those don't have to be internal insecurities. They could be externalities, but I mean, what are, what are the things that you're afraid of currently? This is, I don't want to get too morbid, but I am, I am afraid of my own mortality. I mean, I guess everyone is, who am I kidding? Everyone is, uh, this is not a unique thing. I guess my perspective on it has always been that, uh, the about it, even as a little kid, was when you're playing video games, back when video games used to be hard, you would have like a finite number of lives was nothing left. Obviously, this is just like life, notwithstanding reincarnation. I had a bunch of events happen to me pretty early in my 20s that really gave me this,

really imbued this perspective on me. I know how fortunate I am to be living the life I'm living, and I'm so grateful for it. I just want to do as much stuff as possible while I can, and while I have my facilities, and while I can. And while I have my facilities and while I can do stuff. So I'm only half kidding. I'm not eating a waffle diet. But like, I'm 31 now, man. And I'm thinking about things like my health. And I'm thinking about how I can be more effective with the time that I have. And well-being is a huge part of it. So that's a very long answer of me just being afraid to be mortal. But get me that matrix, man. I need my singularity so I can upload. You're at a point and many people let's reach a point where they have a paradox of choice with a menu of options they could not possibly exhaust, even if they lived for 300 years of different things they could do. And you've invested in a lot of startups.

We'll get to the startup specific discussion a little bit later. But how do you choose what to say no to? And what are some of the ways that you've learned to say no, as opposed to the like, Oh, sorry, I just don't have bandwidth right now, like maybe in three months. And what you really mean is no, but then they follow up in three months, and it just snowballs into this chaotic mess. Well, how do you choose what to say no to currently? And how do you in Are there any any ways that you've found more effective than others to say no? Tim, I was hoping you would tell me this.

I don't know. I was actually just thinking about this this morning. One of the things working with early stage companies, again, that was so heartwarming was I remembered back when Steve and I were starting Reddit and no one knew who we were. No one cared. I woke up every morning and I didn't have a bunch of stuff on my calendar. I didn't have a bunch of people who wanted to get coffee. It was just like I was desperate for anyone to want to talk to me or hear about Reddit. And I mean, this is a, it's a gift and a curse. Obviously I'm in a really

fortunate position where my inbox has this, this problem, but yeah, you're right. Like I'm still struggling. You know why it was a 200 event bus tour. It should not have been 200 events in five months. That is crazy. But it was because I just kept saying yes to everything. And I'm clearly not good at this. This was supposed to be my year of no. And where I would where the default setting would be no, it's been a lot better. Certainly, you know what it has been, I think, and to actually answer this question, it's really been trying to listen to my gut, my initial impulse, the initial feeling of, yes, if I'm not like, yes, I am stoked, I absolutely, I'm excited, I want to do this. And then it's going to be a no or it's going to be let me find some other way to try to be valuable. Because at the end of the day, I want my ideas to scale.

I think like you, like a lot of people in our position, there is a genuine interest to want to help folks and then to also do it in the most efficient way possible and to realize like, look, 20 minutes with Tim Ferriss might change your life, but I know that 20 minutes with me is probably not actually going to change the trajectory of something, right? Like this isn't like false modesty.

I really just think there have to be more efficient ways to be scaling our knowledge. And I haven't gotten really good at figuring them out yet. But I'm always imploring folks to just to hopefully find in themselves to just sort of realize that it doesn't really come down to one particular door that gets opened from an emo because there are so many possibilities and so many opportunities. And I, I don't know, man, I really, I, I need your help with this, Tim. Well, I think just a couple of points there. So the first would be, I don't think 50 minutes with me will change most people's lives either. It's a hell of a lot of responsibility to feel if somebody believes that. So you have to disabuse people of that notion, I think. And also, if you are, let's just say, beginning in your career or a new career or a new company, and you want to reach out to someone who is getting deluged with requests, like in Alexis, asking to pick their brain over coffee without any context is not a good way to do it. Because that often reflects a lack of focus or forethought on the part of the person making the request. So make a very, very specific request, a question they can answer in a handful of lines that will, in fact, be disproportionately valuable to you.

That is, I think, the right place to start. Even more so if you do it in a forum where they can answer one to many like a blog post, right? Because you are more likely to answer that and take the time to give a substantial answer. The second point I was going to maybe refine really is my question. Since you deal with so many startups and you have to be selective, let's just say when you were angel investing, and you may still be angel investing, we'll get to that. When you say no to a company, how do you say no? Because you've had to do this.

You can't just string along hundreds of companies. It'll disallow you from doing anything else. How do you typically say no? What's the language that you use? I mean, I've started a couple companies now. It is basically the language I would want to hear. Obviously, the no isn't the part I want to hear. But everything else is what I would want to hear if I were a founder.

So it's upfront, you know, I'm passing. And here's why. In a few sentences, if I can fairly concretely say what it was, right? Like, I just, I don't think you have enough traction yet. I mean, the growth numbers that I'm looking for are going to be like double digit week over week or month over month. Like, it doesn't seem like, the data doesn't show that you guys have found product market fit and try to, or maybe I wouldn't even say product market fit because I feel like that's a buzzword bingo game, but to really as concretely and concisely as possible explain, like, this is

why I'm passing and I'm sorry. And I do mean this with all sincerity I really look forward to you proving me wrong and I really do wish you all the best because I had people who he never got I didn't name him in the book but I mentioned the story like an executive of Yahoo who basically brought me and Steve in this is early in Reddit and told us we were a rounding error because our traffic was so small we were a rounding error compared to Yahoo and he was he was like, what are you even doing here? And we're like, you invited us. Like you brought us here to ridicule us. And so like that, and to that guy's credit, he's provided me with so much motivation. Like that is, he has fueled, I put that, put rounding, I put your rounding error on our wall in the Reddit office after that meeting, just as like this wall of negative reinforcement for me.

And so that ended up being kind of valuable for me and helpful. And I still am grateful to this day that he was such a dick because it was so motivating. But I don't want to be that guy. You don't want to be the Yvonne Drago to the startups coming to you. No. And saying no is something you have to do a vast majority of the time as an investor if you're going to be successful. And I want to be as helpful as possible, and I do genuinely – I will not feel any ill will. I would actually rather a company – we do this at YC.

We would rather a company tell us, like on their IPO day, email and just be like, hey, heads up. We applied in summer of 2010 or whatever, and you guys rejected us. Or I'd want them to email me like, hey, man, we met for coffee six years ago and you didn't invest, but I just want you to know we IPO'd. And even if they want to throw a silly little animated gif in there just making fun of me for missing out, that's great. I want to know where I got it wrong so hopefully I can learn from it. And I would bear no entrepreneur ill will for even rubbing it in my face a little bit. But I don't want to be a part of that wall of negative reinforcement, even though sometimes you, well, a lot of the time you

have to deliver that kind of bad news. Related to, go ahead. Incidentally, you made that Yvonne Drago reference. For viewers who can't see me, I guess no one can because it's audio. If you've never seen me before, I look just like Y ivan drago down to the down to the like ninth the nine pack or ten pack it's only an even number you have an odd number 12 just just one up at your sternum it's a nine pack in soviet russia yeah yeah i know you've got the got the tight red singlet and everything for those who haven't seen Alexis during his keynotes. All right. So switching from the word successful, whose face pops up when you think punchable? Ray Ray's. Here's the thing, though, and this is something I feel like in tech in this little bubble, there aren't enough sports people who are paying attention to this, paying attention to sort of sporting life. But this is the one thing, of course, that sort of transcended, you know, and if everybody knows about this story now.

And I really do hope, though, it gets because I'm a diehard NFL fan. I love the NFL. And I know this is an extremely violent sport, but what the league has done, I don't want to get all political on this, but what the league has done to cover this up is appalling. And I really hope, I don't know. I really hope some good comes out of this because you know, it's offensive and yeah, Ray Rice is the guy I punch in the face. Now that you mentioned it. What kind of punch? I'm curious. Cause you've got a different build. I mean, you'd have to think it through a little. I never okay let's get real i've never hit a person

maybe i got into some little like stupid kid fights in like elementary school but i am i'm a lover not a fighter tim i don't know what i would do because i'm i got reach ray is not a tall man yeah so i've got the reach on him but he's obviously much stronger than me so a cross here's what's sad too I was named after a boxer so I'm named after Alexis Arguello who is my dad was really into boxing the 80s and he's this Nicaraguan fighter three different titles he's a baller good mustache too and I am the exact opposite of of my namesake in terms of fighting prowess but what do you think? I think elbows, use elbows.

If you haven't punched many people, you'll probably break your hand. And Ray has a thick skull and a big neck. So I'd say elbows. Have you been punched since high school? When is the last time you were punched in the face? Oh man, this was the only time I've been punched in the face since then., this was, uh, it's the only time I've been punched in the face since then. Uh, and I was walking down 16th and mission at four in the afternoon and some

random homeless guy punched me in the face. Wow. Just no, no warning. Yeah. We were just walking, you know, he was going one direction. I was going the other direction on the sidewalk and he's kind of muttering to himself and he just kind of slugged me and and i looked at him and he kept walking by and i was like why the hell did you do that and he just looked at me it was like and i was like all right i kept moving yeah i'm not gonna get an answer so well you know maybe maybe boxing's in your future if you took if you took that and didn't flinch and just asked him why he did it that's well that bodes well for your burgeoning boxing career i mean i'm not and – and I am a tall guy. So I was just surprised.

Why are you going to pick a fight with me, man? But it wasn't – I mean, let's be clear. It was – and I'm not like, oh, it wasn't nothing. I mean, it was a haymaker. It was a wild – really throwing out the boxing references here. It was a wild kind of punch. It caught me in the cheek. But that Yvonne Drago training obviously paid off.

So it didn't hurt me too bad. It stung. I mean, it stung. This is good to know. I won't be throwing any undirected haymakers your way at trade shows or anything. Now that I know you won't go down. The switching gears completely. If you had the opportunity to give, let's just call them entrepreneurs.

That doesn't mean venture-backed necessarily. 18, 20 years old, you could give them two or three books or resources. What would those, and only two or three, what would you give them? Wow. Okay. Oh man. See, you've always got the really heady stuff. I am going to be- The little prince? What are you bringing out? No, well, I was thinking of a few amazing scratch and sniff books from my childhood. Okay, so number one, actually, oh, perfect. So Y Combinator, we're teaching a course at Stanford this semester.

And we've got some amazing guest professors, all like from the YC Network, just amazing founders, investors, just amazing founders, investors, just great people. And it's going to be available to anyone for free. It'll be podcasted, streamed, all that good stuff. So everyone should sign up right now and take that class at Stanford. You don't have to pay Stanford tuition. How can they find it? What's the name? Oh man, hold on. It's called how to Start a Startup. If you Google How to Start a Startup Class Stanford, you should be able to find it. I am terrible with my plugs. Beautiful.

People can find it. That's good enough. They'll be good with the internets. If you can't find it, you probably shouldn't take the class. You're probably not good enough with the internets to search for it. Yeah, it's CS183 Bravo, How to Start a Startup. So that's the class. Silicon Valley, right there, all in your brain, wherever you are in the world. And that's one for sure. Got to give a shout out to Jessica Livingston, who is one of the founders of Y Combinator,

the partner who basically saved me and Steve. We were rejected from the first batch of YC, and it was her input. She basically pounded the table and said, their idea is terrible, but I like them. So we're going to let them in. I didn't know that. Yeah. Jessica's great. She's wonderful. Amazing. And PG was like, all right, all right. Okay. All right. We'll do it. And yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks PG. Uh, but, uh, that worked out for YC. Well for them. Yeah. The first company to launch and obviously the first, uh, sort But anyway, Jessica wrote a great book called Founders at Work, which has been around for a while. And it's just a bunch of really great interviews she did with a bunch of just OGs in entrepreneurship. I am begging her to do a second book because the first one is such as just a must read.

And then the final one is the book that inspired me and Steve to, well, let's say one of the, it's probably the, I'd say it was the book that inspired us to, if not start a company, well, kind of, it was, it was, it was really inspiring us to start a video game company, which didn't quite work out. Uh, but it was called masters of doom and it was the founding of id software. We were huge gamers. It's one of the things we bonded over. I was a much better Quake 2 player than Steve. Let me just make that clear. He was a little better at Half-Life, but I just want to say I was much better at Quake 2. And it was amazing because those guys, you know, John Carmack and Romero and the crew didn't have any funding. You know,

they pioneered an entire industry. They created a genre, right? First-person shooters. And all with, you know, shareware, all with a business model that was still very nascent and they were just kind of hacking it and they created this amazing empire. And it made us think, and Steve had lent it to me my sophomore year, and it really made us think, well, you know, if these guys could do it, like, why can't we? And yeah, that was the big three. And actually, that was the big impetus for my own book, just because like, I don't know, man, in nine years in the game of startups, nine, 10 years, which is still not a ton of experience,

but in the last 10 years, like, it's just, I still am just amazed by the founders I get to meet who make me feel like I was such an amateur when I was in their position. And that's good. That makes me feel good. It makes me feel like we're all making progress here. But it also just is a sense to, it's one of those things in terms of like dispelling, you know, young founders of this notion that like you or I or the people they might look at and be like, yeah, they've really got their shit figured out. They're really cooking with bacon. We are still figuring it out. We're all still hacking it. And we've made tons of mistakes. And we are no different. Some of us may be a

little stronger. Some of us may have some international titles in martial arts. But at the end of the day, we're no different. And that's, that's something I really want to get in people's heads as early as possible to not hold them back. Well, I, it makes me think of a quote, and I'm paraphrasing here, but from Jack Ma of Alibaba, which is slated to or expected to be the largest tech IPO in history. And I'm not even sure if I need the modifier tech. I mean, it's gonna be one of the largest IPOs in history. And he said, you know, in the beginning we had a huge advantage and that was, we had no money, no experience and no plan. And I think when you, when you don't know what you don't know in a way, obviously there are risks, but when you're not aware that what you're trying to do is impossible, then very often you actually pull it off. So there is,

there is an advantage to that. Do you read any fiction? Do you have any favorite fiction books? Oh man, I have not read fiction in a minute. It's mostly nonfiction. I'm trying to think. The last fiction I read, I can't admit to Fifty Shades of Grey on your podcast. So let's see. It would be, oh, man, this is really bad. Last piece of fiction I have read. It's been a long time. I didn't even read Harry Potter.

I didn't either. That's okay. Which I know some people will contest is nonfiction. But, yeah, man. If it doesn't come to mind, yeah that's all right if nothing comes to mind nothing comes to mind that's i'm gonna check my goodreads account or my uh amazon to see if there is man do you have any particular morning or evening ritual or just patterns in say how you spend the first hour of your day or two hours of your day? What is that? And it could be a weekly thing. It could be that you spend Mondays doing A and Wednesdays doing

B, anything like that. But I find that people usually have certain patterns and rituals. I have a sort of a way that I go about say doing meditation and then having tea and then whatever. But what does the first say hour or two of your day tend to look like? Dude, real quick. What do you think? I downloaded Headspace because I don't know if you can tell me this is correlation or causation, but after I got back from Burning Man, I had it planted in my head that I should really try meditation, which is not something I do at all and have never done, but I'm intrigued by.

So we're going to have to, I want to talk about that. But my morning ritual is waking up, feeding my cat and making coffee. When do you wake up? If I'm not forcing myself to exercise, it is whenever I wake up, which is amazing. I stay, I usually stay up probably later than I should, but I wake up whenever I kind of wake up. And that tends to be before noon? Yeah, like around 10, 10, 11, depending on the night. And yeah, feed my cat. And then I'm a real, the hand grinder, we were talking about this on Twitter.

So I broke down and got one of these hand grinders because it makes me feel like i'm closer to my coffee beans as i grind them and it's it's like i'm trying to get workouts in where i can't him so my right bicep incidentally is huge you're like a pincher crab you got like a heat you got a battle arm it's good yes all for grinding coffee and uh i got my little craft coffee subscription and i plowed out make a little french press oh it's great and then usually you know i'll mess around check out the front page And I got my little craft coffee subscription and I'd pull it out, make a little French press. Oh, it's great. And then usually I'll mess around, check out the front page of Reddit, obviously. And although I have been checking out a little bit of product hunt lately.

And just like, I don't know, I just kind of get into my zone. I start prioritizing what I want to do that day. And this is something I've had to be really disciplined with, where I'll actually, usually on Evernote, sometimes I'll write it down when I'm feeling like a pilgrim, when I want to go old school and get up my quill pen. And I'm like, major things to do today. And really try to make sure I get those covered by the end of the day, because I get into this work creep, where I start knocking off really easy stuff, like the things I don't really need to do, but I can get a little bit of mojo, a little endorphin rush. Before I know it, it's

usually noon or one o'clock and I still haven't showered. Then I'll go do that and carry on my day. Usually it's office hours with companies or whatever stuff might be lined up. It's a very undisciplined morning. And my evenings are, this is why I need more Tim Ferriss in my life, man. Should I be meditating in the evening or should I be doing it in the morning? Here's my take on that. My take on meditation is that the less you feel you can afford the time to meditate, the more you need to meditate. So I had Russell Simmons say to me once, he said, if you don't feel like you have 30 minutes to meditate, the more you need to meditate. So I had

Russell Simmons say to me once, he said, if you don't feel like you have 30 minutes to meditate, you need three hours to meditate. So you strike me as a pretty zenned out, calm guy, which means you may need meditation or benefit. The delta in improvement might be less than for someone who's hardwired to be sort of neurotic and super tightly wound like I am. But I find that meditating first thing in the morning before almost anything, and then ideally again, mid to late afternoon is the ideal split. But realistically, if I set it up so that the pass fail requires me to meditate twice a day to pass, then I'll just quit altogether, like a lot of things. And I think you want to, you want to make it easy to win the game in the beginning. So for me,

I meditate five to 20 minutes almost every morning. And I find that to be the ideal spacing. I think headspace is great. I think calm.com also is a competitor to headspace is also fantastic. I meditate without guided meditation and typically approach it from a transcendental meditation standpoint, although I'm very interested in Vipassana. So tm.org for people who want to check it out. I think it's very valuable, but I do suspect that the more tightly wound you are, the less you feel you can afford taking 10 to 30 minutes to meditate, the more you actually need it. So, you know, if you're sort of rolling with your Buddha nature and like admiring the irises of your cat while it's chowing on its fancy feast.

Wait, did you just call me fat because of my Buddha nature? No, no, I'm talking about... Very proud of that. I'm talking about like collegiate sports Buddha when he was doing the pole vault. Very svelte. Similar look. Not a lot of people know about that. Yeah, it's not written about a lot. So that's my take on the meditation.

When do you feel you are most productive? When do you sort of hit your stride? So in other words, people think of, they often ask me, like, what does your average day look like, right? Or journalists will want to follow me for a day. And I almost never do it because it would be extremely boring and they would come away writing an article that is something along the lines of like, wow, this guy, I don't know if he works four hours per week at all because he seems to get, even when he's attempting to work next to nothing done.

And you're able to get some really outsized results and returns from the things that you've put in your mind too. So it would lead one to sort of conclude that it's not about how much stuff you do, but how well you do a handful of things. And so my question to you is like, what is the most kind of professionally valuable time in your day? Like when you're, you're sort of hitting your stride, what are those hours? And you know that feeling. I love that feeling, man.

It is, it is such a drug. There's the, what's the flow. They've written books on this stuff. That is my crack. Like it is so incredibly addictive. And I, again, this is part of why, the reason I feel so fortunate to be able to do this stuff I do, man. Because if it's with people, okay, so if it's solo stuff, if this is, you know, I'm mapping out, oh, I'm mapping out this podcast I want to do. Or I'm helping, I had already talked to a startup and I was helping them build out a launch strategy.

But now it's like Alexis time where I'm going to sit down in front of a blank Google Doc and start typing. When I don't need to interact with other human beings, my go time is once the sun sets. I have always felt like basically like the internet kind of calms down so my distractions are fewer. Right. And more people are asleep so I don't think about checking the inbox and falling into that trap. And all the way pretty much once the sun sets all into the like hours of one, two in the morning, this is now harder to do because I have a girlfriend, of course, who apparently doesn't love the idea that I might spend, say, a Saturday night sitting in front of a computer from 7 p.m. until two in the morning. But this is life and it's the balancing. But that's definitely when I get the solo time going.

And I'll tell you though, I tend to stagger office hours whether it's with YC companies or portfolio companies every like say 20, 30 minutes in the late afternoon because I feel like, well, you know about what time I get up in the morning. So morning is pretty much done and there is this stride that I will find myself getting into because I'm just enough of an extrovert that it's like, all right, lunch is behind. Everyone's got their second coffee in them or what have you. And it's just a good time to be talking through startup problems, having these kinds of office hours with companies. But again, like you, it's really not interesting. And I would, oh man, I'd feel really bad for someone who had to watch that for an entire day because it's really not interesting and i would oh man i'd feel really bad for someone who had to watch that for an entire day because it's just it's such a i don't know it to your point like the you could sit there whether it's me alone in front of a computer for five hours

or or going through a like five hours office hour sessions there are a few moments where holy shit we hit on something and there's something great here. And there are like, there's a way to turn this into something special. And that was a valuable use of the time, but it's not like there was any clear indication of, oh, that was the instance it was going to happen. It just happens. I wish I could just push a button and have great shit come out on demand, but you just don't know. So those office hours, how do you schedule office hours currently? So thanks to amazing software that engineers at YC, it actually originally Paul Graham built, basically any portfolio company can come in and request office hours with any one of the partners. And so we as partners schedule blocks of times. We just block

off whatever, you know, four hour, five hour chunks in a day or whatever, one-hour chunks in a day when we're available for office hours, just like back at college. And startups can slot in to take those times and either show up and do kind of like an assembly line. I mean, it's not that soulless, but do that kind of setup. It's not literally on an assembly line at a cafe or at a YC or over Skype. I've got notes ahead of time based on previous meetings we've had and they've got their latest sort of issues and stuff that helped me prepare. And we just get to it and start talking about whatever they're working on. Do you prefer to batch, let's just say pre-YC or outside of YC, a Y Combinator for people who may not be keeping track. Do you prefer to have one day

or two days blocked out for say a four or five hour block of time? Or do you prefer to spread it out so that you have an hour or two per day, say Monday to Friday? No, I definitely prefer the former. I think when it involves people, it's much better for me to just get it all in one burst in one four or five hour chunk. Whereas if it's like solo work or, or with a sort of limited team and it's over, you know, email and all that kinds of other things, I don't mind the, um, what's the method where you work for 45 minutes and then you're messing around on Reddit for 20 minutes and then you work for 40 minutes. Uh, well there is one called the Pomodoro technique, which is usually a lot of people talk about 23 minute increments, but some people, but some people, but some people double that.

So I'm not saying I'm actually, I'm obviously not a student of the Pomodoro technique, but, uh, but I find myself falling into that kind of a cycle when it doesn't involve something as interactive as office hours. Cool. No, I I'm always fascinated by how people batch tasks or not. In my case, I'm the same way. I prefer to have a large block of time sectioned out for one type of task so that I don't have the cognitive fatigue of switching back and forth. For those people who don't have access to Y Combinator software, I've been using something called ScheduleOnce, which is meetme.so. And that allows people to schedule for a block of time that you make available. It's really helpful.

It was first introduced to me by Andrew Warner of Mixergy, who has scheduled hundreds, probably thousands of entries at this point. And it's been fantastic. When you meet with these startups, is there any agenda? Do you ask for anything in advance? Are there particular types of questions that you routinely ask them? How do you make those sessions most productive, I guess, is the overlying question. You know, I like to come into the meeting with a sense of how, like a general sense of how the company is doing. So things like growth, things like, if at all possible, like the big looming, you know, every founder has, there's a million things that they could be working on, but what is

the big focus for the coming week? What are the one or two big things that you're considering, worried about, wondering? And then also just even notes from our previous meeting. And that's sort of, fortunately, that's sort of built into the software. Other times I'll just hack it with Evernote just for my own sort of sanity, just to kind of keep up and have a sense of things. But I find more often than not, office hours are less about me saying, aha, here it is. This is what you shall do. And more about me asking questions and being skeptical

and giving them feedback that they may not hear just because you're obsessing over a company, you're obsessing over solving a problem. You have this kind of tunnel vision and it helps to have someone just to gut check you and make sure that you're asking yourself the questions you may not be thinking of simply because you're so intently focused. And a lot of it comes down to just basically holding up a mirror at the right time and being like, are you really focused on getting users like you say you are? Or have you been doing the exact same thing for the last three weeks and haven't actually adapted it to the fact that it hasn't improved conversion the founders that i see succeeding

down the road and you could go back and i've been lucky enough right i was in the first batch of yc with steve so i've seen i remember when drew houston was the the founder of dropbox was the guy who like he came to some of our open events and he was working on this sat prep software which was just a dead-end startup and and and, and I remember the Airbnb guys when they showed up and like, we all thought, oh, this is really cool. Like, you know, hope it works out. We weren't thinking, oh, right. In five years, there'll be, you know, have more rooms than Hilton. But I I've seen so many of these companies now get started and the founders who tend to do well are overwhelmingly the ones who during office hours don't just take feedback and they push back, right? Every founder has to be

determined and stubborn, right? You know, she has to think that she's going to win, that we just have to delude ourselves. But a great founder, she also realizes that she can be that stubborn and that determined, but also adaptive and flexible. And so that founder comes out of office hours and then two weeks later or a week later or whenever the next session is, not only has tested all the things we sort of talked about or launched or done or whatever, but also tried three other things and also comes back with a whole nother things that they've learned and really challenged every one of her hypotheses along the way. And that's, it's an easy thing to talk about. It's a hard thing to do.

And it's a hard thing to teach. That's the other crazy thing. It's like, dude, I mean, I think part of the reason entrepreneurship is so hot right now, and especially voices like yourself, I think the reason people are so interested by it is because there's never really been a modern curriculum for it. You can read the old case studies and all the MBA nonsense, but there are a lot of people right now who are hacking it as entrepreneurs, and there isn't a lot of a blueprint for it. If you've grown up pretty much anywhere, I think in the country, you probably didn't get exposed to this

kind of curriculum in schooling because a lot of it's still being written right now. A lot of it can't even be written because we're still writing it. And I think that's why there's such an appetite and a hunger for it and why so many people are very quickly becoming sort of authorities on it. But a lot of what we do is really just saying like, hey, look, the brilliant idea is not necessarily going to come from us. We're just going to help you get there through these kinds of principles and practices and these sort of methodologies. It's a good cop-out. We don't actually have to have all the answers. Well, I think that, and this is true in writing, it's true in teaching, it's true in many areas,

having the right questions is more important than having the right answers because you can have the right answer to a bad question. So I think that it's very important to have the ability to formulate the right questions that get to the crux of the matter, right? And in office hours, just to pull out some concrete details in addition to what we already covered, what are some ways in which you challenge founders or express skepticism in a constructive way? Like what would be some examples of that? Well, I really think a lot can be conveyed with a raised eyebrow. It's something, something I've really, I don't want to brag about, but I'm really good at what are some good ways it's, it would be, I mean, I don't want to, I can't call it specific companies. You know what this is? I will say side note, this is incidentally a section I'm doing on the podcast.

So people will actually get to hear me doing this with real people. But notwithstanding actually being able to magically pull a clip out of my butt, it would be, what's the kind of thing like, all right, I have this company. We're selling a subscription. It's a subscription widget service. And they might tell me about growth rates. And let's say this is a very early stage company. And they're talking about the growth rates, like we're going to 50% week over week. I'm like, well, that's, that's awesome. All right, where's that growth coming from? And again, this is where you get these different shades of this, right? Some founders will tell you, okay, well, 25.3%, maybe not to the 10th place, but like 25% is coming from paid advertising.

50% is coming organically. Another 25% is coming from some other thing. And you get other founders who might be a little cagey at first. They're like, you know, it's a variety of things. And it's like, well, come on. This is your company. You need to know this. And then you dig a little deeper and it turns out that like, let's say a majority of it, a significant majority of it is coming through paid.

And so founders can fall into this very seductive trap where, aha, money out and money in. As long as we can just keep paying for it, don't worry, we can have enough traction to sort of get a seed round of funding one day. And it becomes a really seductive thing in an early stage company and a kind of foolish one because you've kind of deluded yourself into thinking that you have demand where you don't actually. And as someone who, I mean, whether it was early stage Reddit or early stage Hitmonk, we didn't have budget for any ads. It was also more important that we showed that we had built a real product people wanted, that people were actually willing to talk about it. And in an age of abundance,

when it comes to social media, you've got no excuses. If you focused obsessively on making something people want, you will have natural, organic, you will have people just talking about it. You will start to see growth coming from social channels. You will start seeing growth come just organically to your domain. It's not like, oh, that's all you have to do. If you start with focusing on making an amazing product that people just love and they want to talk about, you're building a much better foundation for your company than we're just going to get a product out the door, subscription widgets, it's going to work, and then buy a ton of Google ads or Twitter ads, whatever the next cool thing is,

and artificially build that house or that business on top of something before you've actually proven that you've really made something people want. There you go. Oh, sure. Well, no, definitely. I mean, I think that a lot of folks will use paid acquisition and they'll have a fancy landing page with email capture that promises the world when no one's actually tried it yet. And they use the signups as sort of the week on week growth number. And it's, it can be really delusional. I mean, if I look at the, and I'm going to ask you a very similar question, but if I look at the companies that I've invested in or advise that have done the best, they almost always will take a dollar and put it into product development rather than put it into PR marketing. And there are some exceptions,

but if you look at say Evernote or I mean, Uber's in, Uber's had a lot of wars. So they have, they have, they have a war chest budget. Yeah. They have a war chest budget now for a lot of, you know, aggressive advertising, but for a lot of aggressive advertising. But for a long time, it was product, and it still is product, product, product at the end of the day because the switching costs are so low in a lot of respects. Shopify, very similar. The paid acquisition came after the product had been refined over a longer period of time. I've been sort of criticized even by some VCs, although in retrospect, it's kind of funny given how well or poorly some of their funds have done. Because my investing thesis, if you want to call it that, is very simple. It's, can I be a power user of this

product? Is the market large? Can I drive, say, 100,000 users to this service or product? And does my audience and the reach I have overlap with their target market? It's very simple. And for the most part, that's sort of how I've approached it. And when I've deviated from that and tried to invest in some cutting edge biotech company that's going to have to contend with things that I don't understand very well, like FDA approvals and phased trials and whatever, That's usually when I get kicked in the balls really hard. Can the Tim Ferriss army not help with FDA approval? You know, maybe, maybe on some level, maybe I'm not, you know, fine slicing it. But what are the commonalities that, and I'm going to qualify it, but what are the commonalities that the

revenue generating successes are that you've invested in? So I can't promise that kind of a sort of instant user base, but one of the things that I see, these companies all find ways pretty early on in their business to make money. And I realize this is a bit ironic coming from the guy who started Reddit. But hey, look, we learned this lesson with Hitmonk because we made money on day zero. And that was important because we learned how much stronger of a position you're in if you actually make revenue from the first day. And they knew pretty clearly what their goal was, like how they were going to be making money. We see this, you know, I think about this now, you know, I've pretty much hung up the investor.

Now it's all, you know, I'm not wearing my Y Combinator outfit, but I still have my YC tattoo. And so I don't actually have a YC tattoo. And, you know, I think about it as I'm sitting there in the interview room for Y Combinator, I'm thinking, all right, if this company has already not just shown traction, right? There's not only just signups. There's not only just users coming back every day. They've actually got people paying money for this thing and really have an understanding of this market. I guess that's the thing I like.

They are seeing something that everyone else hasn't quite gotten yet. And it's something that personally resonates with me. And an example would be, oh, okay. So Teespring. So Teespring was an immediate, like as soon as, as soon as the application started going around, I was giddy because I had done t-shirts for like three or no, at that point, maybe eight years. Right. I started with Reddit, did all the merch stuff for us there, Hitmonk, all the merch stuff. And then even a bread pig, we did all this merch stuff and we had actually spun up our own janky version of Teespring just because, you know, Kickstarter had sort of changed people's perception about pre-ordering. And this idea of like scarcity being brought to merchandise was amazing because it made a t-shirt even more

valuable because it felt special, one of a kind. And you have this immediacy, you need to buy it before it runs out. And then it also combined that with the fact you didn't need to have inventory anymore. And this was something that I fundamentally, I knew this because I had triple extra large shirts just lying around the apartment from like five years ago, like these Reddit shirts that like I just could not unload because it was a random skew. And this just happened to be a problem for me that I knew personally, in an industry that's not very sexy, right? Oh, swag, like printing stuff on a shirt. Like we've seen a lot of different varieties of this. But they built this platform so thoughtfully, and it

appealed to me in a way that like, I got instantly just because of my own experience. And we're, you know, generating revenue and clearly had built something people wanted from really early on. So I will, I will admit, I believe I have one of your Teespring t-shirts. Huzzah! Bring in the nerds. Awesome. So those guys are really impressive. I've spent on a few occasions, some time with the Teespring guys. Very impressive team.

Dude, Tim, what are we going to get? Have you not run a Teespring campaign? I haven't yet. Brother, dude. I know, I know. What's it going to take? I got to get on it. Well, I've been thinking about it a lot, so that is pending.

I've been not to take this into the... I'm going to buy your shirt. Mark my words right now, everyone, as my witness. I'll be the first person to buy your Teespring shirt. I'm going to make... I don't care what it says. I'm going to make a camouflage long, slender sort of gap kids small for you with,

with a snap button for the crush. So you can, so it's a onesie. It'll be a, you can't unsee that. I want to do that. No, I'm very,

very impressed by this guys. And I mean, really what's, what's been sort of delaying a lot of stuff like that that I'd like to do is I've been busy sharpening the saw as it relates to my own blog mailing list, redesigning mobile slash responsive versions for the site is basically getting all of the architecture and armature ready for a bunch of big things that I want to do so that the, the, the net, so to speak for conversion is much tighter mesh. See, and that's why I do Tim. I love, like, I don't know when that switch got flipped for you, but you were such a Maven for that. Like when did that happen? I, you know, I, it's, it was very, ah, that's a good question. And you were not in Y Combinator, so I can't take credit for that. Well, you can take credit for it anyway, but I think it really hit me in very late 2006, early 2007, when I started experimenting on WordPress and started the blog and pretty much immediately saw the possibilities, even if I lacked the technical training and

expertise. So I don't have a computer science background. But I remember something very early on that influenced me. And I'm pretty sure it was Robert Scoble, who was very helpful in the early days and continues to be a friend. But he said to me, good content is the best SEO. And I had been so preoccupied with search engine optimization and tags and metadata and all of this stuff that I've realized is extremely trivial compared to putting out good content that other influencers are happy, in fact, eager to share with their audiences. And once the blog started to take on, and it was hideous in the beginning. It was so ugly. People can search, you know, first blog, Tim Ferriss, and find this hideous, like fluorescent blue and yellow monstrosity that I put together.

But over time, just have continued to create a back catalog of evergreen content that doesn't really expire in terms of relevancy. So I now have 550 some odd live posts, the vast majority of which still receive a ton of traffic. So I think that that was really the starting point for figuring out how to use content as an Archimedes lever to attract very specific types of audience. So for instance, I'll sometimes write posts that I know will only appeal to maybe 10,000 of the 1.5 to 2 million monthly readers that I have. And I'll do that specifically as a honeypot,

basically, to attract expertise that I want to have contact with. So I might write about some weird aspect of derivatives finance, expertise that I want to have contact with. So I might write about some weird aspect of like derivatives finance, or I'll put up a tweet or a post about someone in the hedge fund world that I find very interesting, like Seth Klarman, for instance, or Renaissance Technologies or any of these guys. And I'll see who responds or who reaches out to me. And I'll use the comments as a way to develop my thinking around that subject, which allows me then to write something later that will appeal to a million people about a fringe

subject area that not many people know about. So yeah, so it's, it's been, it's been pretty fascinating. But yeah, Teespring, I'm looking forward to doing a bunch of stuff with. Here's a question I've been dying to ask you, which related to questions if you could never sit down with the yc companies as they're coming in and i guess the yc class is around what 170 accepted companies at the at the moment i mean somewhere around there oh i mean in like all time no no i in a batch i mean oh no dude 170 man that'd be that'd be a lot no we had like uh 70 70 70 companies all right i knew there was a 70 all that'd be that'd be a lot no we had like uh 70 70 companies all right i knew there was a 70 all right so i was tagging a one on there so you have 70 companies coming in if you could only choose five of those and again i'm i know this isn't how it's formatted

but uh if you could only choose five of those to invest in personally and the only way you could interact with these companies was sending them no more than 10 questions each. What would some of those questions be? Whoa. Okay. And these are the 10 questions I will use to decide whether or not to invest. That's right. You have to invest in, let's just call it 10% of the people who get accepted. Got it. What are the questions? What are some of the questions you might ask? Oh, wow. Okay. This is bad because I'm really tempted

to think about the questions on the application. You know, I've seen some pretty hilarious ways that people rehearse for the, you know, well, for the interviews. The application I haven't seen recently, but there was this, I remember at some point that they had this simulator which would throw up questions common in YC interviews. And then if you gave a poor answer, there was a, it wasn't an animated GIF exactly, but it was like a picture of Paul Graham that would then shoot fire out of its mouth.

Oh, he does that. Yeah. So, but you can choose, you're absolutely allowed to ask questions on the application form. Absolutely. And so that's, that's really, that's a really good, the form has been refined over the years and it's, it's really good. I think, okay, so 10, I, I don't know if I can keep count, but okay.

You don't have to keep 10. That's just me trying to give a good question. One of the favorites that's not on the application anymore is, how are you and your founders' animals? Describe it. And I guess it got dropped because it's kind of obscure and a little weird, right? How does one describe that? And we're not asking for spirit animals, though I do love asking that question.

So maybe I would put that on mine. But I remember when Steve and I filled it out, I'll never forget. Steve had a really good quip. It was animals? I guess I could have just said that with my voice. Let's try that again. Got to work on my voice acting. Animals?

We're a freaking zoo. And I was like, well done, Steve. Let's keep going. This is good. And we just talked about how the projects we've been working on in college just for giggles, right? The stuff outside of assigned work, the stuff we were doing just because we enjoyed learning and being curious and making things. That's the kind of X factor that I find in successful founders. They are curious for just the sake of it. They are hungry

to learn and try new stuff and challenge themselves. And it's weird. I know there are certain things where I am not, let's say, that curious or ambitious or hungry, right? Like physically, for instance. Still working on that. Not like waking up in the morning trying to optimize my kettlebell exercises. But when it comes to learning about stuff and making stuff, I definitely find that. In me, and I see it in a lot of successful founders, in all kinds of different forms, right? It could just be learning about 14th century tapestries, right? But like having shown that you have this hunger to learn and to do is generally a good sign. And then, you know, the other, the kind of expected stuff with like, well, okay, so obviously

you're going to want to see the growth stuff. That's kind of, that basically gets you in the door. Well, let's, let's drill into that though. Are we looking at week on week growth? Cause I mean, there, there are ways to fake that, right? what would the call a lot of ways so what would the qualifying bs detector add on to that be you know like what's what's your week on week growth i mean people can fake that in all sorts of ways so how do you how do you separate the bullshit from the the real deal if it's just an email set of questions if it's just email it's funny, a lot of this stuff starts to come out a lot easier in in-person interviews because you can ask the next question about, you know, how much of that is organic and start to see a little squirm.

That could be part of a multi-part question. Are you squirming right now as I ask you this question? But it also, the growth question can also be thought about as, all right, okay, then you start looking at things like, well, all right, have you done, say, a cohort analysis? Have you actually taken a look to see the users who have been around for three months? What are they still doing today? How many people – these growth numbers are great. How many times are they actually opening the app? Or how many times per month are they ordering a widget or whatever the applicable thing is?

There's a way to get a little deeper in the numbers. That's almost the baseline, right? That's the kind of thing to get you in the YC. The thing that gets me, I guess, personally really excited is also sort of to talk to the Teespring reference or even, oh, another one would be like Patreon. That was something where they, the founders, were building something and knew something about how the world was going to be that everyone else hadn't yet. And it just so happened that because of my own experience,

I've been working with a bunch of webcomic artists for years through BreadPig, XKCD, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and even a couple musicians like Lester Chambers, helping him with a Kickstarter. And I knew that what artists in the new world wanted was not just a way to try a one-time project like on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, but to actually have recurring revenue. Like being an artist is no longer binary now. It's not starving artist or successful. It's actually like you can make three grand a month making acapella video game theme song music videos from your apartment in Oklahoma, which is actually a guy on Patreon, Smooth McGroove. The founders, like in the Teespring example, had seen something. So I guess the question would be, what have you seen? What are you doing that the world or that everyone else doesn't yet realize

is a really big fucking deal? And I guess we actually, I think we have a question kind of like that on the application, but that's the one that really gets me going, especially if it overlaps with something that I personally really get. And that's part of the reason why. And I see this in a lot of great investors. I know this is like, as you just actually talked about with some of your blog posts, like I think being an investor is like are intellectually curious and who want to learn about new stuff and be able to say that they've had at least some serious interaction or experience with a variety of industries and people and all that stuff. And so that's me just trying to optimize for more moments where I can kind of like Jedi mind meld with another – with a startup that's working on something in industry that I don't necessarily understand as well as they do not as fundamentally, because I'm not solving that problem, but have enough experience with to be like, yes, got it. I see this is absolutely where the world is heading. And you are in the best position possible. And you're the best team possible to

bring this idea to fruition in that new world. No, I that makes perfect sense. I think it's it's also a close cousin of Peter Thiel's, you know, what do you believe that other people don't believe or what, what commonly held truth do you believe to be false? You know, that type of stuff. Mr. Contrarian over there. Mr. Contrarian. He's a smart, he's a smart cookie. Very good investor. What other questions would you ask? Again, keeping in mind that you're not going to be able to sit there and watch him squirm for an hour, but this is cold how How 2000 or was that the name of the computer? You just, just, just, just questions in an email. 2000. It would be,

Oh, you know what I do ask? This is one that I love asking. So I'm all, Oh, it's how 9,000. I Googled that. I did not know. Damn it. All right. Uh, sorry. No, no, that's all right. Sorry, Dave. So I really, really, really love building brands that people love. Like, because of all these tools we have to interact with people in real time at scale, it is possible to build these experiences, build relationships between your users or your fans or whatever on a much smaller budget in a way that we just and the way that we engaged with our users really obsessed over creating an experience that we thought was special that made people go like, whoa, made them laugh sometimes because we have like jokes in the error messages, that kind of thing. And I asked people for an example of something that they've done. What have you built into your product? Give me an example of something you built into your product or your service that you're especially proud of that is one of these touch points for someone to like to just go wow or or feel this sense of like whoa like we're still using robots in there right

we're still using a computer that is soulless or an iphone that may look nice but is devoid of soul and if you can inject this life into your software into the copy or into the whatever you can connect with people in a way i I mean, people still fucking tweet about error messages on Hitmonk and it's an error message. Like, why are they doing that? Because it gave them a moment of levity while they were doing something that they expected to be pretty boring, like searching for a flight. And along with that, I asked for their best piece of feedback email from the last couple of weeks or best feedback tweet, or like, I want to see that founders are responding to every feedback emails.

This isn't a bad way to at least, they'll at least run back to the, even if they haven't, they'll at least run back to their inbox and be like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. And go find something. But hopefully they'll respond immediately and say, oh, here's what we got last week. And it's some person effusively saying, oh, this is the greatest thing ever. And one, one startup, even, oh man, they. They sent me a voicemail. The startup is called Get Bellhops and they do like short-term moves. And it's powered by a bunch of college students who do all these short-term moves.

And it's on demand, really great. And they had this voicemail from some guy, an older gentleman, who was basically like, I just want to let y'all know that he's from the South, I guess. The gentleman, let's say George, who came over and helped me with my move was one of the finest young men I have ever met. I was worried about this generation until I met George. He is an upstanding young man and I am so excited for your company Bellhops. I'm going to tell all my friends. And click. It was just like and it was like it's shit

like that. I mean the bar I mean founders have to realize the bar is set so low because most companies stopped giving a fuck so long ago. Too early. Right? And the bar is set so low, like go above and beyond, make, strive to make a great experience. And you'll get, I mean, this guy,

I'm just, I'm stereotyping here, but I suspect he was not like user 1000 on Twitter. Right. And he's not an early adopter, but he had an experience there that was just above and beyond his wildest expectations. He picked up the damn phone to call and just leave a voicemail with your customer service just to say how amazing this was. And it's like obviously – and obviously they closed the feedback loop, right? They told – and of course they passed along the message to George, who I'm sure enjoyed it. But like that's a sign you're really on to something because it isn't actually that hard. And we see Kevin Hale, who's another partner at Y Combinator, founder of WooFoo, right? That's a sign you're really onto something because it isn't actually that hard. And we see Kevin Hale, who's another partner at Y Combinator, founder of WooFoo, right?

Yeah, amazing company. I've used them forever. Yeah, and rocked it from Tampa, right? He wasn't chilling in the Valley. He wasn't in New York. He was in Tampa after he left YC. And they built an amazing company. It was acquired, I think, by SurveyMonkey. But more importantly, he built this amazing customer service experience. And it's become

like that's his MO. And I want to fund as many Kevin Hales as possible. Again, coming from myself, who was technical enough to be friends with Steve, but not technical enough to program in Lisp, which is what the first version of Reddit was built in, that was my only excuse for existing in the first year of Reddit, was to bring that element and to try to create that, whether it's in community building or in product, to help build something people love. It's something that I really expect other founders to do, and it ends up being pretty easy. Compared to building out the actual site or architecting the back end, this doesn't require a few years of programming expertise. It just requires you to give lots of dams, which not enough people do. No, I agree with you, man.

And it's also true in a world where, despite the complexity of building, say, architectures and infrastructures that can handle tens of millions, hundreds of millions of users, the Lego pieces are commodities, right? AWS, Heroku, anybody and their cousin can go and set up one of these accounts and have the basic sort of modular building blocks. But, which means one of the easiest ways, you get most overlooked ways to differentiate your companies in those touch points, like you said, and sort of having a human experience. And in fact, I was looking up an article that you reminded me of. This was a guest post on my blog called the most successful email I ever wrote. And it was about Derek Sivers, who founded CD Baby. He's so awesome. Derek is amazing. And the most successful email he ever sent out was this email that he sort of very whimsically wrote one night that would become the order confirmation email.

And I won't read the whole thing, but it starts off with, Your CD has been gently taken from our CD baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd. You know, dot, dot, dot. You get the idea. But people just loved this. I think it's so refreshing

in a world where people are accustomed to being on going through a telephone tree for united.com for an hour and a half at a time. Can I challenge all of your listeners? Yes, you can. Boom, here we go. A challenge from Alexis.

Assuming every one of them is an entrepreneur or has some kind of side hustle, they should all go right now. Wait till the podcast is over or no, pause it. Unless you're driving. Don't do this right now if you're driving. But you should go and find your notification email because everyone probably sends it.

I don't care if you're doing subscription widgets or what. You probably have a notification email. And if it is not half as awesome as the one that Tim just read from Derek, work to make it there. Just invest that little bit of time to make it a little bit more human or depending on your brand, a little funnier or a little more just different or a little more whatever. It will be worth it. And that's my challenge. There you go. You can tweet at me too when you did it and I'll give you a favorite. No, that's a great challenge. Much easier incidentally than your challenge, Tim, the last challenge.

The knob-num. Yeah, no booze, no masturbating. That was a very fascinating experiment. It was, we had almost 6,000 people participate and log their sort of daily check-ins. And I think we had thousands of questions asked and answered. Yeah, it was amazing how informative that was and also how much hell I got from some people who just want to be offended. It's sort of right next to basketball and baseball and football and national sport here, it would seem, but that's okay. I'm very happy with the outcome. Quick question on the fine line between determined and entitled slash arrogant. This is something that's led me to cut back on a lot of my angel investing and advising, but I don't know if you saw, God, it's maybe a year or two ago, this video, which caused like collective eye rolling by almost every, every graduate of Princeton was a comedy video called the Ivy league hustle.

And then the chorus was, I went to Princeton bitch. And it's like, it's this ridiculous video. There are actually parts of it that are kind of funny. In fact, I think the star of the video is this guy who pretends to be either an investment banker or a consultant. But where I was going with that is I get the feeling like many startup founders, particularly in the Valley, but elsewhere, develop a certain haughty arrogance very, very quickly. And they mistakenly believe that that's necessary in some way to prove they're successful or to make them successful. Where you mentioned, you know, drew from Dropbox, obviously you've done very well. The guys I've met who have,

for the most part, done the best do not behave like arrogant pricks all the time. I mean, there are always a handful, but where do you draw the line? Because I feel like there's a danger in any collective identity, whether that's Silicon Valley or even YC, where people view their acceptance as this sort of immunity bracelet where they're allowed to be just blatant pricks. And that's not everybody, but you see it a lot in many different worlds, many different industries. But where do you draw the line for you? Is it an important line to draw? What is the proper balance of determined and resilient versus entitled and arrogant in sort of a very, in a sort of Icarus-like sense,

where these people are sort of increasing the likelihood of failing because they're not going to listen to criticism. They're not going to incorporate feedback in a very insular way. That's a long question, but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this. And it's certainly, I'm not pointing the finger at YC. It's just the sort of systemic, I feel like, startup environment as a whole. I've seen a huge uptick in the number of people coming in who really haven't built much, acting like they believe a Larry Ellison or a Steve Jobs would act. What are your thoughts on all that? Well, first and foremost, I need to watch this video and then maybe I can create my own, the public school hustle. I went to UVA, bitch. No, I would not. I will not do that.

You should absolutely do that. You should do that on Patreon and I will give you some money. so okay obviously i mean this stuff is bad form and this is actually part of the reason why i'm so excited for the second season of silicon valley on hbo i i really and i live let's keep mine right i'm a partner yc i live in brooklyn i spent about half my time each place i was born in new york like i'm very much i've got east coast bias i mean it is the right coast right tim am i right it is the right it's the right coast, right, Tim? Am I right? It is the right coast. It is the right coast. So those are my biases. I think it is a problem within the Valley. I think broadly you could say it's a problem in tech,

but I think it's exacerbated in the Valley. And so at the very first YC dinner, so the partners go around and we'll give some sort of advice for how to make the most out of the next three months. And one of my favorite things to say, and what you'll hear the partners always saying is like, congratulations, this means nothing. Like you, you have this, this is you, you still have a very long way to go to actually creating something. I think the challenge is it's twofold. It's one that we just as humans, you know, no one's going to tell a story or write an article about a founder who is respectful and reasonable.

We're going to think of the outliers. We're going to think of the assholes. And those are the ones that are going to get the attention. And that's not to say – that's just sort of a human nature thing. So that's part of the sample bias. Yeah, for sure. But it is still there. I've encountered it for sure.

And I don't know the way to combat it other than to keep reminding people, if you haven't done shit yet, don't act like you have. Correlation is unequal causation when you see people like Jobs and Ellison. Yes, they had serious attitude problems. That is not why they were successful. It's more like they were able to be successful in spite of the fact that they were douchebags. It's a frustrating thing because, I mean, I see this speaking really broadly for like the Valley and tech.

In a matter of years, we the nerds, we have been championed a lot. We've been lionized a lot. You know, they made films about us. It has become kind of cool, right? It's the new band, right? To start a startup is having a band. And that's been great. And I'm happy because generally speaking, I want more people to be thinking of themselves

as entrepreneurs. And I would love it if we had a world where teenagers and kids were like, man, it'd be really cool to build a business or to use technology to make the world suck less one day. That's great. That as a general thing is something that I like. Then though, we reached these new heights and our, what was it? The wax on our wings started to melt. That's right. And we've been seeing this backlash a good bit in the mainstream media, a good bit on the blogs and whatnot. And in the public, certainly in San

Francisco. And again, I've seen this as an outsider, right? So I don't, I don't have a, I don't live in San Francisco, but I've obviously seen all this stuff. And I really hope it's a chance for tech, pinning in really broad strokes here, to take a little bit more of a perspective on where we're at. And for all the people who are acting like they're already Steve Jobs, just stop. That's not going to help, please. And for all of us, let's find ways for tech to live up to the ideals we hope it can be. I really do believe in the power of this technology. I really do believe in the power of software and the internet, but it's going to take work for us to get it to where we want it to be. And acting like assholes is one way to definitely not do that. And more broadly, I want to see,

and one of the reasons I work with a lot of the nonprofits I work with, and you and I are, of course, both on the advisory board of donorschoose.org. Great, amazing organization. And I ran a little tilt campaign. It was last year, we funded every single STEM classroom in Brooklyn on donors choose. So thank you to all of you who backed that and you helped me out with that. And like, I actually know it's a prize you campaign. Sorry, tilt guys, it was a prize you campaign. But the point is, one of the reasons why I'm so interested in involved with these organizations is because I really do believe in this technology. And I also believe that it's only going to live up to so much of its potential. If we miss out a huge portion of our population,

that's not even connected, let alone taking advantage of it and able to create on it and code and build and have that access and awareness. So, dude, it's a big thing. I know this just started with asshole founders. But my advice to them, seriously, for all of you who are listening, you haven't done shit yet. So just relax. Okay, don't act like that. You're not doing yourself any favors. And, and hopefully, that's a bigger challenge to tech because it really can't. I mean, we had two nuclear energy companies. We had a handful of biotech companies in the last batch of YC, some amazing nonprofits. I mean, companies that are fighting cancer, like all kinds of like a nonprofit, the Immunity

Project that wants to create an HIV vaccine, a vaccine for HIV. Like, it's amazing to me that this thing has grown to this point because I remember nine years ago when it was just like, like Paul and Jessica and Robert and Trevor in this little house. And just, we're all just trying to make our websites and I want it to keep growing. And I want our industry more broadly to be able to solve some really amazing problems. But being assholes for our early stage companies is not a good way to do it. Well said. No, good answer.

Which just out of curiosity, which, uh, you need a breather, man. Well said. No, good answer. Which, just out of curiosity, which... You need a breather. Man, I got to get off my soapbox. No, that was good. That was good. You're good on the soapbox. I think you should spend

as much time as you get in there. It's not a load-bearing soapbox. Got to work on your kettlebells. Got to work on that, yeah. No more waffle diet for you. They're so good, though. So, closely related to this, and then I'd love to talk about your new appointment at Y Combinator. And I don't want to chew up your entire day here.

Are you kidding me, too? But when are startups too expensive? And I know this is a super tough question, but there seems to be a divide, at least in Silicon Valley right now. Actually, no, it's not. It's elsewhere, too, because Fred Wilson has commented on this. He's not so much concerned with the valuations, but with the burn rates. But looking at both of those, it's hard to ignore the frothy nature of the market at present. And no doubt there are some incredible companies and opportunities still, both if you're looking to join a startup or to invest in one. There are some amazing opportunities, but there also appear to be very, very overpriced companies. Now, if you assume that or agree with that, there then seems

to be a divide among the investors. There are people who are, for lack of a better term, momentum investors. And they're like, look, everything's going up. It's going up. It's a great company. Even if it's expensive, even if you view it as expensive, it is still a company to invest in because it will be larger later. I'm sure there are other ways they would justify it. And then there are others who say, for lack of a better term again, but more of a value investor, I'm looking at different assets, IP, revenue, et cetera. I can't justify these prices. Therefore I'm going to opt out. Although there's a lot of FOMO and fear of missing out. So even those folks tend to jump on a lot of bandwagons. What is your feeling there in terms of almost like grade inflation, sort of price inflation? Things are, one could argue,

quite expensive. When is a startup too expensive to invest in? So I can't really speak to grade inflation because I didn't go to an Ivy League school. But actually, you know what though? I have to call myself out because although I went to UVA, I was a humanities major. Well, and by the way, UVA is not a bad school. No, it's an amazing school. No, no, it's an amazing school. Amazing school. Very grateful for that. But it's funny. All my friends were engineers.

And I didn't like talking about grades with them because the engineering school is the land of deflation, right? That is where they go to crush souls. Whereas history majors, and I also majored in business, it was like the business was the best part because it was like, great, the five of you colored in the lines. A's. But anyway. Okay, so obviously different investors have different sort of expectations.

If it's an angel investor. Let's assume you're playing with your own money. Okay. All right. Well, dude, if I'm playing with my own money, I'm making this bet partially because. Okay, well. So it gets a little weird, right? I've definitely made bets that were

partially just heart and weren't necessarily like, this is absolutely going to be a multi-billion dollar company one day. But even actually, even factoring that in, I wouldn't really care about the valuation because if I really do believe it's either a multi-billion dollar company or some percentage of it is also just because I want this to exist in the world, I don't want to be sensitive. I don't think there are too many angel investors or early investors who got in at, I don't know what the early Uber rounds were, but there weren't many complaining if they missed out on the four versus the nine or the nine versus the 20 even. Because it's, you know, that's, we all, as investors, we go around saying, of course,

you know, I only invest in companies I believe are going to be multi-billion dollar companies. And if that's true, then you shouldn't really care. Right. And I do, however, wonder, it does seem like times are really good and capital is still really flush. And that has to, right, this whole business thing comes in cycles. That has to come at some point to an end. And I always do chafe a bit. It chafes me when I see startups really trying to optimize for valuation at the early stage.

Because you want to, I mean, this is your seed round. You just want to get back to doing the important shit. You want to get back to running your company and have enough money to go do that. Find the optimal way to get the amount of money you need to get to that Series A or to that next step, or maybe to not even needing a Series A, and get back to running your business. And if you start over-optimizing for valuation or you start falling in love with the investing process, right? There are people who love the fundraising process. People love fundraising. You get to go out, talk shop, right? Maybe go out for dinner. Founders who get seduced by that end up failing.

Yep. Yeah. And so, you know, the investors that play into that are definitely creating a kind of culture that is not optimal for great companies. At what point do you think founders taking money off the table is a problem? When do they become misaligned with the interests of their employees and investors? So I've noticed a number of companies that shall not be named companies that are doing very well, but people want to take, you know, in some cases, millions of dollars off the table. And for those who are not familiar with this process, that means that they're founders who are selling some of their stock to investors and putting millions

of dollars in their bank accounts before employees or investors see any return. When is that a problem? Because I'm seeing it earlier and earlier earlier and that worries me a bit. Even at like the series A level, I'm seeing founders who are like, I'll only do it if we can, each of us can take a million off the table. And I'm just like, that seems like a symptom of potential dysfunction and disaster, pending disaster. I don't know, but you know, maybe. It gets dicey, right? disaster i don't know but you know maybe it gets dicey right i certainly don't begrudge it becomes you know at the later stages i really do think it starts aligning most everyone's interest again so you have to control for assholes right so you'd hope like there's gonna be there are gonna be some percentage of founders who will get that like

personal milestone checked off and it starts becoming a problem. Hopefully, investors identify that earlier. Hopefully, those folks get to some extent managed, but that is not always going to be the case. But I tend to believe the majority of folks who will get to that point are not in that category, but I'm an optimistic guy. But I've seen it at an A round. Now that I think about it, I've seen it in some instances where I haven't begrudged it because it was, and you end up having to trust the founder. Like as an investor, I'm not going to be like, show me your financial records. But you have founders who have a ton of student loan debt. Right. situation, someone needs a lot of money. In instances where there is that extenuating

circumstance, I can't really begrudge them for that. But I do think there is a growing tendency now to see this happening just kind of because. And having that peace of mind, again, let's assume the slate gets cleared. It's not student loan debt. Let's say you have zero debt. If you're at that point as a founder, I think you are best aligned with your company because you value that equity you have. You want to grow this into an amazing thing. You're all on that same sort of level-ish with your employees, which is so important. Where it becomes a real problem is when founders are basically building companies to get to a series A to get a couple million in the bank and then just kind of like run their companies i'm

putting that in air quotes for another few years just to see what happens right that's a real problem yeah and again if you can sort of factor out the extenuating circumstances i think that's where it starts to be really dicey and when you start talking about later stage, I start caring a lot less because I really, I tend to be very founder friendly. I think a lot of, I think the investors that are going to win the longterm realize that they have to be, but I think there are different ways of being founder friendly, right? It's being founder friendly without like sabotaging the company and putting 50 people out of work in a year and a half. Exactly. Now, uh, just, I know this, this might be boring to a lot of people listening, but since I'm curious, how does a potential acquisition offer factor into this? So for instance, I've seen a number

of companies who have had acquisition offers that have not consummated for any number of undisclosed reasons. And they say that the pricing has been set by this acquisition offer, usually that has been turned down according to the founders. And therefore we want this, since we've turned down this acquisition offer, when we raise our series A, we want to take millions of dollars off the table. Assuming other employees do not have an opportunity in some type of secondary offering at the same time, what is your opinion of, what is your opinion of that situation when it, when or when it does not make sense? Yeah, that's why we're getting really inside baseball, man. All right. So, you know, I think, oh man. All right. So part of it definitely depends on

who made the acquisition offer, right? Like if it's Clowntown Incorporated, I'm going to be like, I love those guys. Yeah. Great portfolio. They just, they're really building the future. It really depends on who it is. And it would, so that, that becomes the first thing where like, all right, if this is just, oh, Hey, look, look, people like us. It's certainly less leverage or less leverageable than, oh, Hey, here is like, this is a legit company where it makes a lot. It actually makes a lot of sense for that acquiring company. Like there's more leverage sort of implicit in the offer and it's sort of validates the price and then thus validates

the, Hey, but look, we're going to grow a billion dollar company out of this. And so we just need to take some money off the table, et cetera, et cetera. Dude, it's case by case. I would say I am, am I ambivalent about it? I'm struggling to decide how I feel. So it's a little, so I guess, I mean. I guess that sounds ambivalent. Yeah, sounds pretty ambivalent. The fly in the ointment or one of the flies in the ointment with this type of question is that even a legitimate company, a larger company, it's not uncommon, let me rephrase this, for legitimate larger companies who could be acquirers to open a discussion about acquisition, to go on a fishing trip, to look at the internals of how a smaller company works. And they may have no intention of actually

going through with the acquisition. And in fact, this has happened to some of my companies, which sucks and it's fucking evil. But nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that company was never going to acquire. They were doing industrial espionage, basically. Exactly. But these are large brand name companies to see if they could replicate what was being done internally. Or, this is another thing, to kind of bleed the company through protracted due diligence so that they could negotiate then a better price when the company's running out of funding, which is totally fucked but also not unheard of. So anyway, you know what? I want to pull us out of the weeds, but these are some of the things that I think people need to have a plan for before they're confronted with these situations, lest they make some really bad decisions that are done on reflex, less so than planning.

Well, and I think, okay, so if a founder listening wants to take something away instead of my just general ambivalence about it, consider, all right, if we all believe that is not just, you know, Tim and me, but you as a founder, if we all believe that your company is going to be a multi-billion dollar business one day and you don't have the extenuating circumstances, there's no student loan debt, family stuff, shouldn't it be in everyone's interest, especially yours, to hold on to as much of that equity as possible so that in three or five or 10 years when you IPO, you're actually getting far more value from it. It's weird because we all kind of do this dance, right?

We all kind of play this game as investors and founders and potential acquirers. And there's a lot of this other stuff. But at the very, very core of it, if you believe in your business, if you believe it's going to change the fucking world, like you said, a tech crunch disrupt or whatever thing event, right? If you really believe that stuff you said, then it's actually in your best interest to hold onto that and not cash out a bit early and keep putting everything you can because right. It has an effect on the rest of your company. And I always want to concede that I like, I don't know how to run a company better than the founder does. I know that as an investor.

But at the very least, have that be your starting point for when you go through that process. No, absolutely. And just to add to that, I would say it doesn't even need to necessarily be until IPO. It could be until the point where you can offer equitable options to your options, meaning opportunities, to your early employees and potentially even early investors. So there isn't a complete divergence of sort of incentives. Cool. All right. So very related. Who's your current celebrity crush?

My current celebrity crush? Or recent. Wow. Oh, man. My current celebrity crush. Or recent. Wow. Oh, man. This is – should this be taking me so long? I should ask my girlfriend because she would know better than I would. Nicolas Cage.

I've heard you pining after that. The one true God? Of course. Oh, my goodness. Why? Why? Hold on. This is bad. I don't know. You're not asexual, are you? I mean, you, you, you have, I mean, I have a girlfriend. You'll have to ask her that question. Not that there would be anything wrong with that. God forbid. I live in San Francisco.

Yeah. Let me, uh, hold on. Let me think where, what movie have I seen lately? I'm totally blanking. I did really appreciate the choreography and the Nicki Minaj Anaconda video for whatever that's worth. So if, if Nicki Minaj were coming over for dinner, uh, assuming your girlfriend didn't mind. Oh, well let's change that then. If, if, if she's coming over for dinner, I'll go with a Beyonce. Cause then my girlfriend would totally be down with that. What would you cook Beyonce if she came over? Oh, man. I can't cook, Tim. What cocktail would you purchase for Beyonce?

I could barely – I got a shaker and all that stuff and I tried to make a Manhattan and it just tasted like garbage. And so I just went back to drinking whiskey. So, so whiskey and waffles is what you're telling me. I can't, I don't even have a waffle line, dude. I think that should be the name of your podcast, by the way. I could take her out. Whiskey and waffle. That becomes the theme. There's a good, there's a good Thai place near me called Pok Pok, which is amazing. Oh, those guys are famous. They actually, I have Pok Pok's cookbook literally about 10 feet away from me. Dude, I love Poc Poc. And it's weird because it's like, it's legit.

Like, it's not Pad Thai. I'm not an authority on Thai food. And the dude's white. So I know a lot of people are going to be really skeptical and be like, really? But he actually does it. He actually does a really good job with it. It's a good restaurant. Wait, are you going to, you're not going to set me up with this Beyonce date?

Well, you know, I'm working on it. This is not the kind of thing I have to, I have to, I have to start returning her text messages. She's, uh, she's just like three in the morning. They got, they got kind of incessant. Uh, so to sort of bring this volume one of our discussion to a close, what are your current projects and where can people learn more about them? Because you have a lot to share. You have a ton of background, but why don't you give an overview of what you're currently focused on and what you'd like people to check out? All right. Well, I am a partner now at Y Combinator. I joined as a full-time partner last

batch in June, and we have another batch coming up and we're taking applications right now. So because I know every single one of you already signed up to listen to the Stanford class, we're going to be teaching how to start a startup. You should also go and apply at apply.y combinator.com. And then we also accept nonprofits, by the way, we have some amazing Watsi, W A T S I was an amazing nonprofit that went through the program. And we're willing and able to take applications for the next 27 days to apply. So apply to Y Combinator and let them know Alexis sent you. I don't actually think there's a section in the form for that.

That's not in the dropdown for how did you hear about us? How did you hear about this? That optimized the funnel, man. Just to put a hard date on it. What is the deadline for the application? Deadline. Cause you all are going to wait until the last day is October 14th. So put your calendar, set your deadline for October 13th. I should have just told people at 13.

Yeah. It's October 13th. Get it in by October 13th. Tweet at me when you do so I can thank you for sending in that application. And then I'm also getting into this podcasting game, Tim, and starting up a little thing. It's called NYRD Radio. That's New York Research and Development or NERD Radio. And it's just going to be basically it's an extension of the Without Their Permission book and tour in that I want to talk to people who are doing

really cool stuff using the internet to be entrepreneurial in weird, interesting ways. So not just founders of startups, but like comedians. My first guest is Baratunde Thurston. Oh, wonderful. Yeah, he's great. Amazing. And he runs a company called Cultivated Wit. And I'm also talking to a friend of mine, a supermodel named Cameron Russell, who has an amazing TED Talk, one of the top 10 most viewed about beauty. And she started an amazing activist group and sort of creative space in Brooklyn. But all these people are using the internet in unconventional ways to just make stuff, to create. And I want to show them off. And then the other section of the podcast is called Office Hours, which is just

a riff off of what we do all the time as investors and partners. And that's just basically doing Skype chats with, I'll be doing Skype chats with random people from all over the internet who want to get some feedback, want to have some office hours with me about whatever they're working on. And we got some really interesting folks. I went to the Our Entrepreneur, or no, Our Startup subreddit a couple weeks ago. I said, hey, what's up? Holler at me if you want to do this segment. And we had a bunch of great people.

So if you are interested in even coming on the show, you should tweet at me. Because I was not proactive enough to come up with a better way for you to get in touch with me. So just tweet at me. Let me know. And I'll include links to all of this in the show notes as well, folks. So you can check that out at 4hourworkweek, all spelled out,.com forward slash podcast. You'll be able to find a blog post accompanying this episode with links to everything as well. And this all came full circle, man.

I want to thank you because it was on four hour work week that I dropped the first excerpt of my book, without their permission, when it launched last October. So it's been a year now, and here we are, full circle, and I'm dropping my podcast. Yeah, well, you know, it's my pleasure. I think you do a lot of good work out in the world. And I would encourage people to take a look at some of your activism as well. Oh, yeah. Net neutrality, man. Yeah, yeah. Please give that a plug, because I think it's a very important, critically important topic.

So how can people learn more about that and most important, take some action? Oh, man. Okay, so technically they should have taken action a few days ago because the open comment period just ended. But let me thank a few people. 3.7 million people commented, basically sent in a message to the FCC saying, don't fuck up the internet. Don't let cable companies screw up the internet. Preserve net neutrality by reclassifying broadband as Title II, which is not the sexiest thing, but it's DC. But it's really, really important we get this right.

And right now we're going to have these open uh sort of discussions the fcc is having these open forums now for the next few weeks so basically pay attention and the best group actually to stay on top of this stuff right now is either eff which has just always been on point for protecting our digital rights eff.org the ff.org electronic frontier foundation they're awesome or fight for the future.org they are a very startup- Foundation. They're awesome. Or fightforthefuture.org. They are a very startup-y nonprofit that works to expand the internet's power for good. And they've been on the front lines of this whole thing.

You probably saw the internet slowdown day. Everyone, I mean, it was Reddit, Imgur, Tumblr, everyone was participating. And that was the record for number of comments sent to the FCC. So yay internet. So hopefully this is another sopa pippa situation and all of us can save the internet one more time.

So thank you if you helped. Yeah, it won't be the last time either. Yeah, it won't be the last time. It's going to still be time for that because look, right? At the end of the day, reclassifying broadband as Title II just comes down to making sure,

and Jimmy Kimmel did a nice illustration of this. John Oliver did a great one as well on his show. But it just comes down to making sure that all those bits are treated equally. And so if Tim Ferriss makes an amazing podcast, any one of you can hear it as easily, as quickly as any other content, as any other podcast, whether it's coming from the White House or whether it's coming from NBC, it's the exact same. And it should be treated that way because it lets the next Tim Ferriss come up with the same level playing field that you had and the White House has and NBC has to compete for our attention. Hopefully a lot better than me without all the defects. But yes, I agree.

It's always improving, man. Constant improvement. Well, Alexis, thank you so much for being on the show and taking is improvement, man. Constant improvement. Well, Alexis, thank you so much for being on the show and taking the time, man. I'm sure we'll be chatting again. What is your Twitter handle for people so they can say hello?

At Alexis, A-L-E-X-I-S, Ohanian, O-H-A-N-I-A-N. I know it's, it's, it's a little long and ethnic, but,

uh, there are not too many Alexis Ohanians out there. So I got that on lock and, uh, got to rep, got to rep the Armenian thing. So there's no way I are not too many Alexis Ohanians out there, so I got that on lock. Got to rep the Armenian thing, so there's no way I was not going to put my last name in there. You got to start boxing, man. You got to start boxing. You know what?

That's a tough guy combo. You're named after a boxer and you're Armenian. You really got to work on that. I should be able to rumble. I know. Well, you know what? If you'll train me, Tim, deal. I only have short gaifu. I can work on it.

But there's some fantastic Muay Thai instructors in New York City. And there's also a wonderful Brazilian jiu-jitsu school run by Marcelo Garcia, who's a six-time world champion, which is amazing. Also co-owned by Josh Waitzkin, who is also on this podcast, who's considered a chess prodigy and was the basis for searching for Bobby Fisher. So you should swing by. It's an amazing school. I could beat up Bobby Fisher? No, you probably, well, Bobby Fisher probably. Would kick my ass. Josh Waitzkin, probably not because he's a black belt under Marcelo,

but you could certainly learn a lot from both of them. So I will- It would be a better story if he kicked my ass, actually. I'd tell my grandkids that. I think that can probably very easily be arranged. So I will put all the links, folks, in the show notes. And until next time, Alexis, thanks so much. And everyone, thanks for listening.

Thank you. If you want more of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or go to 4hourblog.com. F-O-U-R-A-T-O-U-R-B-L-O-G.com. Where you'll find an award-winning blog, tons of audio and video interview stories with people like Warren Buffett and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter. It's twitter.com slash tferris.

That's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. Or on Facebook at facebook.com slash timferris. Until next time, thanks for listening.