Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #102 - Andrew Kortina

Episode Date: November 20, 2018

Andrew Kortina is the cofounder of Venmo and Fin. Fin is a high quality, on-demand, personal assistant and executive assistant service. You can get a $100 credit to try Fin at https://fin.com/ycAndrew blogs at https://kortina.nyc/The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.***Topics 00:32 - Human dignity and work8:07 - Creating jobs10:07 - From The Beautiful Struggle // The Beautiful Game - You might argue that we’re already in a sort of failure mode, where our ability to assign dignity to arbitrary work and motivate people to work bullshit jobs is more efficient than our ability to allocate labor towards industry that would have greater social benefit, like education, healthcare, food, etc. If we’re already in this failure mode, it’s kind of the worst of all worlds, because not only are we assigning meaning to work that doesn’t need to be done, but, also, we could be redeploying that labor towards efforts that are actually important today. 18:32 - Travel21:02 - Why do we want to do anything?22:07 - Life after Fin25:17 - From The Emperor Has No Clothes, There is No Santa Claus, and Nothing is Rocket Science - I want to preface this talk by warning you that it’s quite possible you’ll interpret much of this talk as cynicism. It is not my intention to be cynical. My goal is to treat you with respect by speaking to you honestly, without any grand illusions.None of the companies trying to convince you to work for them will mention technological determinism. They will confirm what your parents and teachers told you, that your work and contribution will be totally unique and significant.32:02 - From The Emperor Has No Clothes, There is No Santa Claus, and Nothing is Rocket Science - I recognize that the meditative aspect of craft is an excellent way to cope with meaninglessness38:32 - Technological determinism43:02 - Andrew's company Fin48:17 - Ryan Hoover asks - When (if ever) will Fin task completion be 100% AI-driven?49:32 - Differences between running Fin and Venmo56:47 - Venmo's Lucas ads58:32 - Spencer Clark asks - How did you and your co-founders decide to sell Venmo?1:02:02 - Charlie Kaufman on Screenwriting - What I’m trying to express – what I’d like to express – is the notion that, by being honest, thoughtful and aware of the existence of other living beings, a change can begin to happen in how we think of ourselves and the world, and ourselves in the world.1:08:30 - Get $100 credit to Fin at https://fin.com/yc

Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's episode is with Andrew Cortina. Andrew's the co-founder of Venmo and Finn. Finn is a high-quality, on-demand, personal assistant, and executive assistant service. You can get $100 credit to try Finn at fin.com slash YC. I'll also link that up in the show notes. If you want to find Andrew on Twitter, he's at Cortina, and he's blogging at cortina.noyc. All right, here we go. All right, Andrew Cortina, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me.

How's it going, man? Pretty good. Cool. So you are the founder or co-founder of both Venmo and Finn, but you're also a blogger. Yeah. And I wanted to talk to you about a couple of your essays, specifically around work, human dignity. There's one called The Beautiful Struggle, The Beautiful Game, and you end it with, as we give more and more work to software and machines,

I think it's worth asking why we've historically regarded work as fundamental to human dignity and whether or not it's still useful to do so. So I found this interesting because you wrote this after selling Venmo. And then you went and started another company. I assume like you could have taken some time off and not worked. Why do you go back to work? Yeah, I think it's I think it's very difficult

to change your own idea of dignity and I don't necessarily even think it's something that you come up with yourself like I've thought a lot about this and when I was younger I kind of thought I had an idea of like okay what is the good what does it mean to like be a good person

And just either that was some like objective truth or it was like something I had like come up with myself. And I think the older I've gotten and the more fortunate I've been in life, the more I kind of recognize that a lot of things that I have are not necessarily things like I have accomplished myself, but things I've received from like teachers or like, reading great books from the past 2,000 years of Western civilization or the culture that I grew up in, the country that I grew up in. There's like all these things that, you know, you think you can take credit for like a work ethic, right? Like that seems like one of the most, you know, free will determined thing, like a strong work ethic. But you probably learn that from some role model.

And I don't know. So anyway, to get back to that question, I think I've sort of come to think more and more about, okay, like, where does my own conception of dignity come from? Why does that, why would that involve, like, working and, like, making things or doing things for other people? And I feel like a little bit less ownership of it. And I guess where I was going with that essay was like, okay, why would a culture? culture, connect dignity with the idea of work. And I just think it's been a useful thing to do. If you live in a very uncertain world where there's things like, you know, a horde of locusts

can take out the crops for the year and then there's famine, right? Like you want to incentivize people to be productive and create a surplus so you can kind of like endure those natural catastrophes. And for me, I like growing up. in the United States, I think there's a lot of connection between like work and entrepreneurship and dignity and kind of like doing service for others in your country. It kind of gets back to this like Protestant work ethic stuff. And even though I think I can recognize like all these sort of like cultural influences on my own conception of dignity, it's really hard to, I think,

convince yourself of something otherwise because you know it's all a ruse and like even i don't know on the one hand you could say it should make it easier to like just change your mind about something yeah but like if it's if it's been inside of you for so long it can just feel like i don't know like i don't like i just i don't want to go like sit around and do heroin all day like i'm sure that would be like really fun and i don't think there's anything wrong with that but if if would be very tough for me to like not feel bad about that even though I don't think it's a bad thing for somebody to do and I think it's like just as dignified as working on you know an important problem um but I don't know this this stuff gets ingrained pretty deeply I think

it's hard to change for somebody especially once they're older like maybe it can change across generations but I think it takes time well you did describe I forget I think it was in that Maybe it was in the essay before. These kind of like flow state moments you've had outside of work. You know, you were talking about moving this like bench to the roof of the house. And I thought that was great, by the way. That was like a serious contraption. Oh, that's so fun.

Yeah. Yeah. And like that's a thing. I mean, I think that's actually maybe even more of a default mode in the Bay Area where you see people like entering in this state of like vaguely working. And then they just like do projects. Right. And but yet did that compel you? like maybe working with your hands and like jumping from one of those one to the next?

Because when I'm going through these essays, I'm like, are these just thought experiments or do you just take a month or two and like actually become a Buddhist and see what happens to you? No, I've never like there's, I have a love-hate relationship with boozeism. I've never like done it myself. But it's very much like my American point of view where it's like I had this thought once like, like, Like, you know, Buddhists are not going to get us off this planet when the sun burns out. Like it's a very, from my sort of, you know, 50,000 foot view of it, it seems like a very like internal focused. Life is struggling. How do I cope with this and like pacify my, you know, struggle with the futility of existence and all the pain and suffering that exists in life?

but I don't see a lot in that sort of philosophy that would motivate a civilization to, like, do large projects that help lots of people. And I think that's one of the cool things about American culture is, like, I do see that. And, like, that's kind of what I like about the idea of, like, dignified work is that, you know, it is a motive to inspire. the people who have been a little bit more fortunate to do things that might help people that are less fortunate. I think that's cool. But it sort of presupposes this world where that was necessary. And as that becomes less necessary and there's more abundance, then we're less sort of resource constraint, that connection between dignity and like doing useful work maybe becomes dangerous and like if you know maybe not everyone has to be productive maybe not everyone has

the opportunity to be productive and then are those people sort of like locked out of ever having any dignified life just because we had this useful mechanism for motivating people in the past which is a weird situation and like i don't know something i think about a lot so then do you do you not buy the argument that humans are very very good at creating jobs when we when we were talking last week. I was talking to you about people playing truck driving simulator on Twitch and then making money by having fans who donate to their truck driving simulator talents. You don't think that's realistic for the future?

I think humans are very good at creating jobs. That is, I think that's like an attention economy thing, right? Like watching other people drive trucks. And my guess is they would fall. power law where like a vast majority of people would watch a few people doing it. I think most things follow

a power law. And so with respect to like, I don't know. Like a lot of the arguments that people make are when we get to the point where nobody has to work anymore, everyone will just do art. I'm not sure.

Like it depends on why you're doing art. One of the things I like about creating things is sharing them with other people. And it's pretty depressing when you're like putting like months of working to something and you put it out there and then nobody enjoys it. Right. So I'm not sure that's the answer to like what will people do when they don't have to like

do manual labor anymore. But I don't know. I think we're probably a long way from the point where nobody has to work anymore. Yeah. But we should be thinking about it. We should be thinking about it. That was how you ended the other essay when you said like, like what would be the last human job gratitude.

And it still resonates with you. Yeah, I saw that on the prep materials. I was like, yeah, I still like that one. It's always good when you look back on something you wrote a long time ago and you still like it. Yeah. Because it doesn't happen that often. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. So I'm, I'm curious about this failure mode that you're talking about in the beautiful struggle. I'll read the posts and then you can describe it. You might argue that we're already in a sort of failure mode, where our ability to assign dignity to arbitrary work and motivate people to work bullshit jobs is more efficient than our ability to allocate labor towards industry that would have greater social benefit like education, healthcare, food, etc. If we're already in this failure mode, it's kind of the worst of all worlds,

because not only are we assigning meeting to work that doesn't need to be done, but also we could be redeploying the labor towards efforts that are actually important today. Do you think we're there? Yeah. I mean, I think about this a lot when I go to a supermarket. And I guess, I don't know, when you, I got into the habit of like going just like, you know, like a bodega in New York for a long time. if I needed toothpaste or something.

And then I remember I had this experience where it was the first time in years I had gone to like a big supermarket to get toothpaste. And there was like a whole fucking aisle of toothpaste. And I just was like, and I was like vividly remember that I was like writing about this and like trying to like make this and do a thing. And I haven't done yet, but I'll probably still use it. It was like I walked into this supermarket and like I had made several attempts to get. Oh,

need of the toothbrush. And it made several attempts to like get toothbrushes where like I saw someplace on Valencia Street but I saw some people like in there. I was like I can't be near them right now. And then I was like brushing my teeth with my finger and toothpaste for like a couple days. And then there was like this Saturday. I was like, all right, I'm going to do it. I'm going to get my toothbrush today. And I walked into this safe way and Bruce Springsteen's, everybody has a hungry heart was on the radio and I went and I asked somebody like where is the tooth brush aisle and there's just like this massive store and I had to like navigate there and I get to the aisle and it's just like a wall of toothbrushes and I wanted like just a regular you know cheap one dollar

toothbrush and I was standing there for like five minutes like trying to find a cheap shitty toothbrush And then I just was like, how have I, like, I'm never going to get this five minutes back. Like, this is the worst possible thing ever and just like look at all the garbage in from the meat. And think about all the time and like the people that thought about, you know, this toothbrush versus that toothbrush and all the effort that went into like that and marketing that stuff. And, you know, somebody then went and stocked all this stuff and like made the decision that this is what. which should be on the shelf in the store, and this is how many toothbrushes they have. And I was just like, oh, my God, this is, like, so wasteful.

Yeah. Like, it just wasted, like, five minutes of my time, which I'm pissed off about. But, like, the entire sort of line of production and marketing and distribution that went into, like, making that moment happen and just a total waste. And it's just, like, if you think about the things that you actually need to survive and the things that you value kind of at the end of the day or like when you're reflecting on things. It's such a small piece of commerce that's happening right now.

And there's just so much garbage put out there because it's like easy to sell, I think. Yeah. Well, I think there's, it's both easy to sell and then people like games, right? So you're entering into this company and this market where you're like, oh, I can do better than that. guy.

Yeah. Without stepping back and thinking, do we really need this, you know, toothbrush with like a thousand bristles instead of 900? Yeah. I mean, this is the kind of my thought about the singularity is that it already happened. And money is the algorithm that is already controlling all the people and telling them what to do. The machines have already taken over, I think. Literally from the beginning of money

Or do you think when money was digitized? Money is an API for people And that's when we see the control to the machines Yeah, I thought That's so interesting I thought it was going It was coming through our phones And because we're getting used to intermediating

Between these like pretty bad devices It's going to be so easy for us To just have the full integration happen As soon as you're interacting with like AI podcast guest AI. Did you see the Chinese AI newscaster? No. It was on Hacker News the other day. It was great. I mean, it's like completely digital newscaster. But that's an interesting thought. Yeah, is like a good one. Money and dopamine, because that's the one that your phone has access to.

Is that like an internal secret Venmo slogan? Money and dopamine? No, no. Money is it like API for humans? No. No, that wasn't. Actually, we wanted to take it. kind of like humanize the money and make it less about the dollars and cents and more. That's why the note is like such a focal point of them. I was like, what is the thing that you're doing?

What is the moment that you're sharing with somebody else? Yeah. I can get you thinking about that and not about the money and the money is just hopefully in the background. So if this world, like the commercial world is overwhelming to you or just whatever. whatever, too much.

Do you practice some kind of stoicism? You have nothing in your apartment? What does it look like? No, I mean, I have, so my girlfriend has a bed. I would have just a mattress on the floor. But then I'll have like, like stuff that I use. Like I have a couple of good knives for like cutting vegetables, right? And like cutting board or like good pots and pans.

but then I don't have like tons of other shit and like I'll try to like if I if I'm not wearing clothes I'll try to get rid of them so I don't know on the one hand I don't have tons of stuff but then like for the stuff that I know I'm going to use a lot I like it to be something good but I don't really have a

I don't know I remember this I had this professor in college this guy John Ricketti and I was studying Shakespeare in London and he was like the professor from my school that was also like abroad and like I was studying abroad he was teaching abroad

and so he would like do stuff with us and he had this over for Thanksgiving dinner and he would always be taking us to plays and stuff and I remember one time he told me that he was just we were like you know drinking a glass of wine or something and he was like you know when I when I die I want them to write on my graves

don't. He always lived behind his means. And I was like, that's just, I just, I really respect that sentiment. So like, I don't know. I don't love having tons of stuff, but I also have no problem with that kind of like, extravagance and like form of expression. Yeah. I mean, if that satisfies you and can keep you going year after year. Yeah. I don't, I don't know. I don't see it happen very often. Yeah. I don't think it. But I don't know. But I don't know. For those people, that was more like the kind of like host vibe, you know, I think that he had. It wasn't like he was necessarily buying like tons of objects.

It was like spending money to like entertain or something. Right. Well, that more falls in line with like spend money on experiences. Yeah. But which is again become contentious of like these color factory type things where people like, oh my God. Spend money on artificial. manufactured experience for vanity. Yeah.

I mean, that's also just depressingly commercial or just like travel. I don't know. Like I was in, I went to Cambodia, I think, a couple years ago. You think you were in Cambodia? It was someplace. But that's the point. It was like the market, you know, the street market there looked exactly like the street market in Mexico City.

And it was just like, the entire time you're there was like you in this relationship to everyone else there as the tourist. And everything was designed to like extract money from you either in the form of like goods or experiences and like tours and stuff. And just to this point out where like so much rather go like explore YouTube than like be subjected to that kind of like commercial tourism machine. Well, average input, average output. Yeah. You know, you can, I'm sure, I've never been to Cambodia, but I'm sure if you go off the beaten path, you can have that experience. And you can have that experience if you just, you know, talk to someone instead of trying to buy t-shirts, right? Yeah.

But it's very, the thing that, it's hard to actually talk to someone there and escape that, you know, you as tourist construct. My, the thing that's changed for me in the past, I don't know, five years is I'm, I've gotten really into bike touring. Oh, that's cool. Bike touring's cool. First of all, because anyone can do it. It's not hard. Like, you can just start with, like, 10 miles a day, stay in hotels.

But second is that it makes you interesting everyone around the world, which I've found to be super cool. Yeah, that's really cool. And you're the least interesting in the places where you, like, in basically Europe, right? Like, in like the most traditional touristy places. So you're like, I don't really. Like, first of all, there's. infrastructure to explore all that stuff.

But it's also like, oh, I don't even need to go there now. Instead, I can go to Vietnam and ride bikes around there. That's cool. Which point people love you. Yeah. I like that. I love biking. It's really fun.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I could see a world. I spent like five months in a row bike touring. I didn't want to do it forever. But that was that point where I was like, oh, I am pulled back to work, whether that's like constant work for this, you know. this company or this like long-term project i have no idea but like i want to do something

but why yeah why do something you know like why like is that natural or is that just because you know of all the things that you've read right like why do we want to do something yeah i don't know it's uh i i i was able to scratch the itch of like physical exertion day after day while bike touring. After a while, I stopped doing, you know, a new city every night because you spend so much time thinking about logistics, which is really boring and tiring. But even so, I think I just came to the conclusion that, like, the person that I wanted to be was not an adventure blogger. Yeah. Full time. But if that's what you want to do, it's super cool. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I couldn't come to an answer of why I do something. Like, I guess without infinite money, I was like,

okay I need to do something. Yeah, I mean, that's a good, but for now, but maybe it won't be in the future. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's definitely a question mark. Do you have visions of like, you know, assuming you don't work on Finn forever, your post-Fin life? Probably won't be a corporation.

I mean, it's, you know, what's cool about what we're going to be. working on is it's really hard and interesting, which means because it's a hard problem and there's like financial incentive, you get to work with a bunch of other really smart people, which is cool. But, like, having to wake up to an alarm every day and, like, be, there's a huge cost to, like, coordination with a bunch of other people. Like, everybody has to be awake at rough at the same time. I don't know.

It's just like, do I want to do that? I don't know. The struggle is real. Well, but the thing, it's not like, the alarm is like kind of a tongue- I know what you mean. Yeah. But it's so hard to get into like a creative mode where you can like, I feel like it takes like hours to get to the point where you can like be like productive,

creatively. And so then any sort of like routine and scheduling can just really disrupt that. Like if the muse is speaking, you want to be able to like write down what the muse is saying and be like available to that, which when you're like coordinating like huge chunks of your day around other people's time, it can be difficult. So. But then on the other hand, like, the idea of like just you know solo you know writing all the time that seems kind of lonely so

I don't know it's a tough yeah I think it cuts both ways but I know so many people that are like oh dude if I just like quit this job then I can do my thing and then they quit their job and they yeah it's hard it's really hard to like do something yeah I mean you got to be super disciplined either way. Like, yeah. I'm sure there's someone who's like just randomly like, there's a movie idea and it immediately becomes super successful.

Yeah. But most people, not so much. So this other essay where you talk about technological determinism, the emperor has no clothes. There is no Santa Claus and nothing is rocket science. This was a lecture at Cal. Yeah.

Right. And I found it really interesting because it kind of ends up dovetailing with a lot of the ideas that you talk about in the context of like, okay, maybe in a future, we will not have to work, but as it currently stands, I'm working, you're working, you're looking for jobs, whatever. This is a lecture to college, undergrad, college kids, right? In a class where, like, all the other lectures are by business people. About what?

Like, starting companies and stuff? Yeah, the Silicon Valley. Right. Okay, gotcha. Yeah. And I thought you started it out in a very honest way where you said. I wasn't there, but I just read the, this is like a transcript, right? Yeah.

Yeah. You say, I want to preface this talk by warning you that it's quite possible you're interpret, you will interpret much of this talk as cynicism. It is not my intention to be cynical. My goal is to treat you with respect by speaking to you honestly without any grand illusions. And then you go off, right? paragraph that jumped out to me is you said,

none of the companies trying to convince you to work for them will mention technological determinism. They will confirm what your parents and teachers told you that your work and contribution will be totally unique and significant. Yeah, that's a, I mean, that's a, it's kind of a shitty thing to hear as a college student, I think. I remember, like a similar thing I heard from a college professor, like I was having coffee with right after I graduated.

She said to me, like, I remember I was like about your age when I realized that I didn't have time in life to do all the things I wanted to do. And I was just like, I like the idea of like, you know, telling somebody something honest like that when they're younger. But the, I don't know, the kind of thing I was getting at with a lot of this was I've had a ton of fun working on hard problems. with smart people. But I think I see a lot of companies and like I'll go visit college campus a lot to do recruiting

and kind of look at like I'll look at other companies like engineering blogs and just like or like I'll hear, you know, advertisements on like a podcast by some engineering company. And when I graduated from college

and I went to like Penn where you know Wharton is a big part of the culture there and so it's like a very it's basically a vocational school and that infects the entire rest of you know every other program at Penn it's like everybody's very focused on you have like you have to take no I mean but it's just the vibe of Penn it's like I went to NYU and it's like yeah yeah so like everybody's like you know what internship am I getting or whatever And when I graduated from school, I don't know, 2005, pretty much everyone that did a good job in high school, got into a good school, the next step that they were told to do was to go get a job on Wall Street at an investment bank or at a consulting company, like a top four consulting company. And that was just like the track. And then you kind of like get married and have kids and you have a stable life.

Now I think that those type of people who follow the track that was put in front of them go to get jobs here in Silicon Valley at technology corporations. But, and I think that's fine. Like if your goal is like, if what you value is providing sustenance or like, you know, stable home environment for like kids or for other people that depend on you. It's probably a great way to do that. But my problem with the way that Silicon Valley does it is they've always had this like Wall Street is the bad guys. They're all about making money.

Silicon Valley is about, you know, building the future and, you know, like achieving, like the American dream and like just being, doing no easy. evil and it's really like I don't know like maybe some people get that out of it but I have a problem with you like selling that to other people and telling them that you're going to be their source of meaning and you're going to enable them to like be impactful in the world I kind of like like there's a certain honesty to like the Wall Street it's like come here work hard make a lot of money yeah like okay That's the deal And these technology companies don't really Frame it like that And I just like There's a lot of great companies

And they're building things that like are making the world better in a lot of ways But I just think they oversell this Feel Good About Yourself thing Right When they probably don't even have to Yeah Yeah I don't know I like

On one hand I do think that Technology usually is a good thing And like many of these companies are working on great stuff. And they're also giving jobs to people that are, you know, great, solid income. Yeah. And I have no beef with someone. It's like, hey, I'm just going to go work at whatever X company, make this money. You know, I'm like providing for a family or parents or or just, you know, myself, which is fine.

And then like the thing that's been kind of irking me lately is like financial independence being used as this like meta game that gets, uh, like kind of thrown into the mix with young people, many of whom don't really have to earn $300,000 a year. Like they come, maybe they come from a family, whatever, that's like they can support them. And it just makes me sad because I'm like, oh, you're kind of getting played with this game. And because you're like by default, this game is like a multi-year game that will encompass like your 20s, you might not ever do anything. Yeah.

And that makes me sad. but yeah there's a lot of time after your 20s to do stuff no totally but I just like speaking obviously people do things over the course of their entire lives but I look around at my friends and like yeah you have kids and it's very easy

and I don't have kids so it's hard for me to say but like it's very easy it seems to make that your whole thing yeah which is I guess also fine yeah I mean that's a I just I think it's a fine decision if people kind of go into it with open eyes and like fully understand it I feel I just feel like there's like a little bit too much marketing of it in a certain direction that makes me uncomfortable yeah hmm you you said at a point I mean you're quoting some of the uh the advertisements so like the words were craft built for everyone do the I'm just laughing do the most meaningful work of your career

It's like, maybe. But the line that jumped out afterwards that I really liked is when you said, I recognize that the meditative aspect of craft is an excellent way to cope with meaninglessness. Yeah. Which, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's a, it is a, it's very meditative to let, like, one of the things that's awesome about writing in software, You can just like go into this, you know, state where you're just, you, you spend 10 hours and you're like, whoa, that was so fun.

It's like playing a video game, right? Or, I mean, I think I'm not like a great drawer, but like I've done some drawing. Like when you're like just, you know, drawing that cup of water right there and like looking at all the different like shadows and contours and just focused on that, you kind of throw out all this. verbal, analytical parts of your brain and that is probably the type of stuff that leads you to existential despair. And it can be nice to escape that for a while. And I think like craft has that sort of, you know,

like cooking is like that or writing software is like that. Working with your hands, I think, is like that. Doing Excel, I think is like that. Like there's a lot of things that are like that where you can kind of like just focus in, go into that, you know, all the, all the, everything else dims and you're just like in the zone. Yeah. And it's a good escape from a lot of other things, I think.

It's also a helpful way to, well, it's an easy way to critique other people without getting to the core of the thing. It's a, I used to do it. I mean, I still do it. So one of my buddies. Oh, by saying, like, I'm a craftsman. And then you critique everyone who's not a craftsman. Well, that's one that I've definitely heard. Another one is just critiquing someone else's style without getting to the core of the thing.

Another one is saying like, oh, you didn't do this well and I would have done it really well without recognizing that you didn't you didn't do it at all. And this person is accomplishing stuff. Yeah. And I think that is not healthy. But then on the other hand, some people clearly like all these things are dichotomies, right? Yeah. Yeah, it is, I don't know. It is tough.

There's a lot of garbage out there, but there's a lot of people trying their best. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, at some point in one of the essays you mentioned, like, it's possible that, like, VR would be a suitable life for people. Maybe not for you right now, but at some point, who knows? Yeah. I mean, my R is pretty good right now, is that I like to say? Yeah.

But, like, why is the R better than the VR? I don't know. That seems kind of random. it's all just by the time you're conscious of it it's all information anyway so um theoretically you could have a VR that yeah is just as good as reality oh yeah i mean VR plus some kind of like chemical combination i could absolutely see being better than real life yeah for for almost everyone yeah if not everyone i could like be a professional basketball player in VR never going to happen

Oh, no, totally. In reality. You can be good. Yeah, I mean, so if you could somehow slip into the, like, really feel like you're LeBron James. Yeah. Like, I've never dunked a basketball in my entire life. Yeah, that would probably be pretty sick.

It would be awesome. Like, I don't know. In a stadium with 50,000 people, like, cheering you on, I could be down with that. That sounds awesome. Yeah. But again, you're left with this thing. It's like, okay, like, after I've consumed every level of the VR game. Yeah.

Maybe. Or maybe it's just life. there's this good Ellen Watts thing I heard where he was talking about being omnipotent and living forever

and he was like you know you would end omniscient and he was like yeah you would you know you would that would be cool for a while but then you probably get bored and you start doing these simulations where you're like okay like

I'm going to make this game where I like limit my omnipotence in some way and you know just it'll make it a little bit more fun and then you kind of get bored of that game you realize like well like I always know that at the like after the game is over I'm omnipotent and omission and I live forever and so it like lowers the stakes a little bit and so you like then you start taking away uh the fact that you know it's a game, he like returned to this state of the struggle of of limited finite life. And it was just like, he kind of like got there from, of course that's what you do if you live forever and where I'm left in. Right. It's exactly this.

It traps it. I mean, do you ever, do you ever lucid dream? Not really. I have the thing where I become conscious but can't move right before you wake up, which I don't like. Yeah, no. I wish I lucid dreamed instead. I haven't had your experience, but I've definitely lucid dream quite a bit. And my problem is exactly what you're describing. Usually what happens is something's happening and then I predict what will happen in the dream and then it happens.

And then it just happens over and over and over again until you realize you're in complete control of the dream and then you wake up. Yeah. And that's it. Yeah. Just like, you rapidly ruin the entire thing. Yeah. And you, could you, just so people understand, we did a podcast with Tim Urban, wait, but why.

Hmm. Cool. He's cool. Yeah. And he talks about this technological determinism as the human colossus. It's basically the same concept. Yeah. There's like, this ball is rolling.

This product will be made. Yeah. You even say, if Venmo. If not Benmo, something else would have happened in that same space. How do you define technological determinism? Yeah, I mean, the way I talked about it in that talk was like a little bit. I was talking more about a corollary. Like technological determinism, I think, is just a society as a product of technology or something.

But the kind of thing I think about a lot as a corollary of that is that, I think evolution is like this and technology is like this, where things that are efficient and productive will eventually be created out of necessity because they make life more successful. But if you kind of follow that to its end, you get into this place where it's like, okay, well, like, if everything useful will necessarily be invented by somebody out of, out of need like why should I work on anything right like if any any possible useful thing

I could come up with somebody else is going to come up with because it's useful so like why do it's not that unique or interesting like so maybe I should just do like all the crazy useless stuff in order to try to rescue my free will basically now the problem with that is if everybody thought that nothing useful right would ever get done. So it kind of like presupposes that it's a like, you know, only a few people realize that, I guess. But I don't know.

That's kind of how I think about technological determinism is the idea. Like, yeah, useful stuff will be built. Technology is moving forward at this pace. It's kind of like an unstoppable force. Yeah. And as much as like people, you know, yearn for the good old days or the, you know, Portland's life of, you know, making your own cottage cheese or whatever. You're not going to, somebody's going to keep technology moving forward.

So it's tough to fight against it. And you use JFK's moral argument. Yeah, that JFK's speech from, it was a, he gave this talk at Rice talking about the space program. And he was talking about like, why, like, why are, like, why are. are we going to space cost a ton of money yeah um he says some awesome stuff in there one he's like why does rice play texas and he's like comparing the space race to a football game which i think is hilarious like but i i had to step back because that was the one that i was like i don't know the college football rankings well enough and i was like oh it's because texas is amazing and rice is

like okay right that's the argument well i just think it's why do anything why does it one college play another at all. Why is that even, like, why is there a football game, right? Because it's fun and, like, competition is interesting. And so, like, that's kind of like one angle of it, which is like, I think really, probably the better argument, or like maybe the more, sorry, that may be like the more truthful argument. He then gives us other argument, which is if we don't do this space exploration thing,

somebody else will. And right now that somebody else is Russia, and we don't know their motives. And, you know, space technology, like all other technology, it has no morals of its own. And so it's sort of like up to the good people, the more moral people who like,

if you're in the U.S., that's you, presumably, if you're JFK's audience. It's up to the good people to like build, the powerful technology first so that they can fight back against the bad people who also will eventually build that technology. And I think that was just a really interesting argument. You can justify a lot of things with that argument. And who's to say that once you build the technology, what you'll use it for?

But that was a pretty compelling argument, I thought. I mean, it's the same one that Open AI is using right now. Yeah. and most AI researchers. Yeah. So, which is, I mean, at some point we should talk about what you're currently working on. Yeah. Right.

So let's do it. So Finn is within the AI sphere. Yeah, we're, so we'd like to call it AAI, which is artificial artificial intelligence. When we started the company, there was like all this. So Finn, it's a personal assistant service. And so you can like email us, text us, call us, whatever, send us work. Like you would send an executive assistant. And when we started, there was like all this excitement about like Alexa and Google Home and all these pure software, AI, natural language processing things, which have very good speech to text, kind of natural language processing.

And they're pretty good at understanding like most sentences that you would say to them. But they're not really capable of being your full-time assistant. And so our thought was, well, you know, these people are saying like this is going to be, you know, like the AI from 2001 Space Odyssey or like Jarvis from Iron Man. And we're like, it's nowhere even close to that. But we want those things. So why don't we like try to build that today and hack it by having a system where you interact with it just like that? But instead of trying to build it with pure software, which if Google can't do, obviously like it's not possible. we'll just have a team of people on the back end

but do it a little bit more like Uber where it's a network of people providing the service they're enabled by technology like Uber not going to be possible without GPS so there are certain technological improvements that you can take advantage of to like enable this distributed workforce to provide a new kind of service

that wasn't really possible in the past and we thought it would be cool to do that for personal assistance type stuff and just take all these sort of mundane digital chores that you don't want to do yourself, but that you're probably doing right now because there's like okay tools to do them. And because there's like okay tools to do them, not many people have assistance anymore. And so they're doing them themselves. But it's really like not an efficient use of your time. For instance, if you're some executive or whatever to be like scheduling five hours of meetings every week, right?

I guess like venture capitalists, they would typically have somebody scheduling their meetings. But there's a lot of other people where they don't have an assistant and they're doing stuff like that at work or maybe they're just doing stuff at home like, you know, dealing with service providers and Comcast and like a plumber. And if you're spending three hours of doing that a week, which is like for a lot of people, they probably are. and you have kids, that's like three hours that you're not spending with their kids. And if you ask somebody like, which one would you rather do, go help your kid with their homework or like play with them for three hours or be figuring out something with your health insurance. Like clearly people are going to choose spend time with their kids. The sort of historical problem is you can't really get an assistant for three hours per week.

It's pretty tricky to figure out how you. I mean, there are people that tell you you can do that. It's pretty hard to do that. To get somebody good, you typically have to buy in chunks of 40 hours per week. Or just do tons of work to figure out, like, vet somebody, find people on Upwork or whatever it is, like some remote VA. And then if that person disappears, you have to do the whole thing again. There's just, like, a huge amount of cost involved in, like, trying to piecemeal it together.

So we thought, like, well, okay, like, why don't we kind of, like, do all that work to, like, find good people, train them, build it so it's like a kind of like consistent and reliable experience. Remember all the sort of like nuances and preferences about you so that when turnover and nutrition does happen, you're shielded from that. And like the entity like remembers your preferences around dentist appointments or whatever, right? You don't want to have to tell, you know, if you're hiring a new assistant every year because they're turning over, it's not really useful to have that person do your dentist thing because you only do that once a year and you have to retrain them on the entire thing every time.

So we've kind of taken some, a group of people that we have, train them, give them tools for collaboration, knowledge sharing, workflow management, process management, and built this system where, like, everything that any one of them learns about you or about the world, like how to book Hamilton tickets or like how to do one medical right and like encode that in our system and we can actually be a lot more efficient at it than a single person on their own could be and we can give it to you in a much more incremental way where you don't have to buy in blocks of 40 hours got it and so there are many questions around will finn so Ryan Hoover from product hunt Yeah. Ask when, if ever, will Finn task completion be 100% AI-driven?

Yeah. I mean, well, if the day that happens, nobody has to work anymore, right? Because if Finn is a black box open-ended system, right? Like, we will do any work that you send us, right? So the day that Finn can do all work, no human has to work again. And then we're all go to the beach and drink peanut-caladas and we're at the back and beginning of the podcast. Yeah. Yeah.

That'll be great. So our sort of bet is While there is any human work to be done Let's build the system That is the best at doing human work And we'll use software to give our humans leverage And hopefully make them far more productive Than somebody who's not part of our network

Or it doesn't have access to our tools and knowledge base And you know for the decades to come while humans still have to work, we want to be the best place to do all that work. Are all these people in the bay? Are they all over the way? No, no. Most of our people over right now are in Phoenix. Oh, okay. Yeah. What's been the hardest part and the biggest difference between starting Finn, reverse Venmo? I mean, with Venmo, it was always really difficult to raise money because it was a very expensive business to run and it had to be like a huge like VEMO is just now starting to like start to monetize.

Yeah. And the method for that is to enable all these consumers to pay businesses because VEMO doesn't make money when you pay your friends back. And so that was like a very, very like long term bet on a certain way to make money. and because we were never making any money and had to deal with all these like SEC laws and things like that it was always like very difficult to raise money

and we had to like use money for all these things that were not really like making the product better so that was like a kind of thing that made Venmo hard and also was like the first kind of like company of any size that I worked on so like first time managing people so lots of challenges like that

with Finn on the other hand, I like have a little bit more experience managing people so that part like is somewhat easier or you know at least I have like some experience and knowledge of doing it in the past

and we have a business model we're both like kind of like previous entrepreneurs and had like social capital so that made it a little bit easier to raise money and then the hard the hardest thing about Finn is just complexity It's like the exact opposite of any of like the perfect YC company.

Whereas like the YC company, you pick one thing or like any, you know, like a Silicon Valley company, you pick like one small thing. You get really good at doing that thing. You get by doing tons and tons of reps on it. And then if you get a bunch of people using that, then maybe you kind of like expand outward and like add on like another little thing and then get really good at that. Within, we're competing with a full-time human. assistant and a full-time human

assistant, we'll just do whatever you ask them. It's not like you hire a human assistant and he's like, hey, can you help me find a time to meet with Sam next week and book me flights to Phoenix? Yeah. And then the person says like, well, I don't book flights. So you're going to have to do that yourself. But I'll schedule the meeting.

Like that, if we built that, we just wouldn't be competitive with a human assistant. So we kind of took into this. We have to be able to do anything. which is really hard. One, it's just hard to, like, kind of mark it and, like, explain to be what we do because it's not, like, we do one thing. We just do whatever.

The other thing is it's really hard to under, well, the second thing, it's really hard to just build tools that do anything that are, like, both very general and also, like, pretty productive and, like, easy for people to learn. So it's hard to build the tools for our team that's doing all this work. And then probably one of the most challenging things, is measurement. And we spend a huge amount of time on measurement, trying to understand things like, okay,

who's doing a good job on our team and who's not? Who needs help? Where do they need help? Who's good at which specific type of task? Where is all the time going? Why is this thing, you know, this one type of task, greater variance than another type of, task in terms of like how long it typically takes somebody our team to do it. How do we

categorize like different groups of customers and understand like what they would want, like what they would demand? We have to also predict for any given, uh, week of the year, for any given day of the week, for any given hour of the day, how much customer demand is there going to be? Because we're like stocking labor, basically. And if we're under supply, then people have to wait too long for work to get done. If we're oversupply, then we're just like burning money. And then the other thing is really hard. The measurement is just hard because it's a black box system.

And so we have a heterogeneous set of people doing the work who have very different tenures, which is another big thing that affects how well they do their work, different innate skill sets. and then a very heterogeneous set of customers and a very heterogeneous set of types of tasks that we do. And so it can be really hard to, like, say, we released a new thing last week. Is it making the system better or worse? To try to find an apples-to-apples trend line

where you can say, like, okay, like here is the impact of that thing. You have to slice on so many dimensions to try to get to a dataset that can tell you if any of the work that you did was actually good or bad. So it's just really complicated. It feels like, I don't know, like trying, you know, to do measurement in, like, macroeconomics where there's just like a billion different dimensions and you're like constantly like,

oh, well, we have to like normalize for this and normalize for that. How much is usage correlated with what you market that Finn can do? I think today your demand for Finn is much more a function of you than of our marketing. So to get you to realize that, it's more a matter of just kind of making sure you know the basics of the system. It's helpful to talk to you about it because it's very difficult to put in front of you. and like it's really helpful like ask questions about like what your needs are and then basically we just tell you like we can do all those things but we can't like know a priority what your needs are and then like put those on a page for you right um so there's a certain sense where like talking to you

for a little bit helps us like realize your full potential as a customer but say you're the type of person that needs five hours of help per week we're not going to invent another like five hours of work that we can do for you. So it's a little bit different than like a media business in that sense where we could probably come up with another five hours of like TV that you would be entertained by even if you were only currently spending five hours already per week. But it's not like as soon as you say, Finn will book flights for you. Everyone uses Finn to book flights.

Well, the people that need a flight book, but we're not going to convince somebody that doesn't need a flight to book. Right, of course. So it's very much a function of, like, each individual customer, like, what they'll find. Gotcha. So do you ever have a moment when you talked about your Lucas Venmo ads? Do you ever have a moment where you're like, I want to do this again. I want to do the same thing.

I want to do it for fun and, like, get these ads everywhere. I don't like to do, like, to do a redo like that. I mean, the Lucas ads were these subways ads that we did for Venmo and New York. York. That was really fun. I don't think we would do something like that. Because the market for that was a little bit different where it's like every person could use Venmo, you know, when those ads went up in New York. With Finn, it's like, it's not a product for every person right now. The thing I liked about Lucas was that it was not really, it was like in the place where you would see an ad, but it wasn't actually really an ad. It wasn't actually really an

ad. It was more of like a non-sequitur. It's like confusing stickers all over the subway. Yeah. So I like the idea. And I've done this like with stuff on my website where like, you know, like my about me is like not really an about me. It's like partly fictional and like really long and like just not. You look in like a place where you're expecting to see one thing. Yeah. And then you see something that doesn't really belong there. But your conversion rates, bro. Yeah.

Well, yeah. But I like that. And so, like, there's something about that and thinking about, okay, what would that be for Finn? You know, it could be, like, you know, being showing up at some conference and, like, doing some crazy shit that was, like, not what we were supposed to be there to do. I think that would be fun. But I'm sure it would be different than, like, what worked for a memo than what we would do for Finn. So Spencer Clark asked, how did you and your co-founder decide to sell Venmo or why? Well, one, the options were shut down VEMO forever or sell it.

So that was like a pretty easy decision. The reasons why, I mean, what's probably more interesting is to talk about like, why was Brintree a good match for VEMO? So one, obviously, like Bill Reddy, who was the CEO of Braintree, only person that kind of like got it and was willing to like fund the vision of Venmo and like build up this consumer base for the sake of having a bunch of people who were wired up and comfortable using payments on their phone so that they could eventually pay businesses. He was particularly, I think, amenable to Venmo because Braintree had,

Brain Trade is another company similar Stripe, where they do credit card processing for all these different businesses. And the margins on credit card processing are really thin for some of the like Braintree or like Stripe. But for PayPal, they're actually awesome because PayPal is basically doing a ton of transactions that come from bank accounts

and then charging a credit card processing fees. So instead of making like five basis points, PayPal is making like 2% or something. So it really like gives you many, many more multiples on your margins if you're in that payment processing business. And so what Bill saw was like, okay, like Venmo could help brain sure you go from this like very, very, very thin margin. But it's still pretty thin margins by like any standard, but like still many multiples on what they had. So that was kind of why he thought it was a good fit. And the teams kind of mesh well.

and they were well capitalized and had like a source of revenue and could kind of like balance out all this demo that was basically just dumping into user acquisition wiring up people's bank accounts with the hopes that one day we could somehow convince merchants to accept memo as a form of payment. So it just made a lot of sense. One, for Venmo to be part of Braintree because it was like the sort of like matching halves. And then the same thing, when PayPal requires. wired brinkery, I think PayPal is one of the few people that could like understand the value of Memo because it's like basically the same exact playbook as PayPal.

Understand like the long term investment it takes. I mean, I'm sure it's it's probably been over like a billion dollar investment now to like wire up all these bank accounts and subsidize all the peer to peer transactions with the hopes of someday turning on payments to the merchant network, which is now finally. happening and my guess is will probably work out pretty well for PayPal but like it you it would be very difficult I think for a private financier to kind of accept the billion dollar dream question mark yeah yeah so it just made made sense uh cool so yeah because that how long ago was that i think 2013 yeah it was a while ago yeah yeah uh the last thing i want to talk about was that Charlie Kaufman's speech. Oh, man, that's so good.

Anyone who's listening to this should go, you should link to that speech. Charlie Kaufman's incredible. I'd never heard him speak before. I think that's like one of the only times he did that. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, that was great.

Did you transcribe that on your own? Just like, no. I think I found either the YouTube transcription and cleaned it up or it might have been on Basta's website somewhere. Okay. But I kind of paced at the, transcription on my site because I wanted to like add emphasis in certain areas because it's long and I thought it might be helpful to have like some highlights in there um but yeah I don't know if

you want to like say something what the speech is or like give people some context but it's it's awesome man well so Charlie Kaufman's a screenwriter being John Malkovich and many other movies and um that basically the setup is talking about I mean I can just, I can pull it out right here. So he talks for a while and then he goes into this moment of self-reflection on the talk to the audience about his own talk where he says, what I'm trying to express, what I'd like to express is the notion that by being honest, thoughtful, and aware of the existence of other living beings, a change can begin to happen in how we think of ourselves in the world and ourselves in the world. So that was awesome. Yeah. I mean, there's so much in there that's so good.

It's really one of the best things I've come across in many years. It's really inspiring. He talks a lot about sort of his motives, what he's trying to do in film and just making things. And I think he kind of in that, it gives context for a lot of stuff he's seen in his films where he's reacting to this mechanization of human relations that kind of alienated us from each other and prevent authentic communication

and he points to that and a lot of problems that he sees in film with people just like mechanizing and putting out more of the same shit that's just copying something else and not doing anything new. But I think in a lot of the work, he does, you can see, he sees that also in our, like, daily interactions

with other people or, like, in our relationships with even, like, family and friends and stuff. It's very easy to just fall into a routine and, like, just saying the thing that is automatic. And he gives this part, there's this part in that speech. where he talks about he's running in his neighborhood and he passes this guy running and the guy and he's uh he's running down the hill and this guy is running up a hill and the guy's like oh sure

it's all it's all downhill that way and he laughed and he's like oh that was a good that was a good one i like that and then he passes the guy again same spot and the guy same exact thing says it he's like oh that's kind of interesting i guess maybe like he forgot he said to me it happens in another time same spot he's like i guess he just says that every time he sees somebody here and he like wasn't really even paying attention to me and then he passes him like and he like charlie coffins going uphill and the other guy's going downhill but he still says oh sure it's all downhill that way and it's like it has no context or like recognition or acknowledgement of like the state of the actual world it's just this automatic thing to say

And I think, I don't know, he points it out in, it can happen to our work and can happen to our relationships with other people. And I don't know, I found that really poignant. It was so great. And it, especially in the context of a type of work that I think most people regard as very creative. Yeah. He's like, he goes into craft in the same way that you talk about it. He's like, oh, I don't think he says the name of the movie, but he's like, I saw the trailer for this movie that's going to come. come out is beautiful. I'm sure it's going to be perfectly done. Yeah. But it's just going to be

totally mediocre. Yeah. Not really accomplish anything. Yeah. And so yeah, I think like the, first of all, thanks for posting. And I had not seen it before. But also, I was just curious about like how you're, you're trying to personally apply this idea. Because it's obvious based on all your highlights that you cared about it a lot. Yeah. I mean, I really feel deeply about like, there's a lot of important stuff in there. Um, but, uh, I don't, I just, I don't like the idea. This is a little bit against the thing I was saying at Berkeley was there's a track that, you know, has been laid out for everybody

and just like the certain way of doing things. You can, it's very easy to just like do the automatic next thing without thinking about it and then wake up 50 years later and realize you haven't thought for yourself at all. Not to say that it's necessarily bad to do. I'm probably like a little bit more generous on this than Charlie Kaufman would be. I don't think it's necessarily bad to like do something that other people are doing or like that has been done before. If you decide that that is like the thing that you want to spend time doing or that's going to like facilitate some other thing that you want to do,

what's tragic to me is that there's a lot of people who don't even like understand that they're in this automatic mode. and just like following the next thing and like copying the thing that somebody else did or somebody doing the thing that somebody told them to do. And the idea of like somebody like that, you know, waking up 50 years later and me like, like, wow, I didn't want to do any of that or just never realizing and having that thought at all. It's just sad. So I try to spend a lot of time thinking about like, okay, like how do I be intentional? Like, am I doing the thing that I want?

to do is it going to be like different in some way than something else because I do like the idea of trying to do something differently than the way other people would do it so I think about that a lot but it's kind of a rabbit hole and like you can you can spend a lot of time thinking about that and realize that it's pretty hard to do and maybe not possible yeah yeah and you can fall into a new kind of trap, which is competitive mindfulness, which I find so funny. Yes. I can meditate longer than you can.

Yeah. All right, dude. So if someone wants to talk to you online or try out Finn, what should they do? So try out Finn. We have a code for, you know, somebody asked like, when's Finn going to be free? It's not going to be free, but you get $100 credit if you sign up at fin.com slash YC. So you could just try it out there. And then if you want to find me online, Corti.

with a K on Twitter or Cortina.m.m.c is where I posted on my writing. Awesome. Thanks, man. Thank you. All right. Thanks for listening. So as always, you can find the transcript and the video at blog.combinator.com. And if you have a second, it would be awesome to give us a rating and review wherever you find your podcast. See you next time.