One of the advantages of having kids

is that when you have to give advice to people you can ask
yourself, "what would I tell my own kids?", and actually you'll
find this really focuses you. So even though my kids are
little, my two year old today, when asked what he'll be after
two, said "a bat." The correct answer was three, but "a bat"
is so much more interesting. So even though my kids are
little, I already know what I would tell them about startups, if
they were in college, so that is what I'm going to tell
you. You're literally going to get what I would tell my own
kids

, since most of you are young enough to be my own kids.

Startups are very counterintuitive and I'm not sure exactly

why

. It could be simply because knowledge about them has not

permeated our culture yet, but whatever the reason

, this is an area where you cannot trust your intuition all the
time. It's like skiing in that way - any of you guys learn to ski
as adults?

When you first try skiing

and you want to slow down, your first impulse is to lean

back, just like in everything else. But lean back on the skis
and you fly down the hill out of control. So, as I learned, part
of learning to ski is learning to suppress that impulse

. Eventually you get new habits, but in the beginning there is

this list of things you're trying to remember as you start
down the hill: alternate feet, make s-turns, do not drag the
inside foot, all this stuff.

Startups are as unnatural as skiing and there is a similar list

of stuff you have to remember for startups. What I'm going
to give you today is the beginning of the list, the list of the
counterintuitive stuff you have to remember to prevent your
existing instincts from leading you astray.

The first thing on it is the fact I just mentioned: startups are

so weird that if you follow your instincts they will lead you
astray. If you remember nothing more than that, when you're
about to make a mistake, you can pause before making it.
When I was running Y Combinator we used to joke that our
function was to tell founders things they would ignore, and
it's really true. Batch after batch the YC partners warned

founders about mistakes they were about to make and the

founders ignored them, and they came back a year later and
said, "I wish we'd listened." But that dude is in their cap
table and there is nothing they can do.

Q: Why do founders persistently ignore the partner’s

advice?

A: That's the thing about counterintuitive ideas, they

contradict your intuitions, they seem wrong, so of course
your first impulse is to ignore them and, in fact, that's not
just the curse of Y Combinator, but to some extent our
raison d'être

. You don't need people to give you advice that does not
surprise you. If founders' existing intuition gave them the
right answers, they would not need us.

That's why there are a lot of ski instructors, and not many
running instructors; you don't see those words
together, "running instructor,"

as much as you see "ski instructor." It's because skiing is

counterintuitive, sort of what YC is—business ski instructors

—except you are going up slopes instead of down them,

well ideally.
You can, however, trust your instincts about people. Your life
so far hasn't been much like starting a startup, but all the
interactions you've had with people are just like the
interactions you have with people in the business world. In
fact, one of the big mistakes that founders make is to not
trust their intuition about people enough. They meet
someone, who seems impressive, but about whom they feel
some misgivings and then later when things blow up, they
say, "You know I knew there was something wrong about
that guy, but I ignored it because he seemed so impressive."

There is this specific sub-case in business, especially if you

come from an engineering background, as I believe you all
do. You think business is supposed to be this slightly
distasteful thing. So when you meet people who seem
smart, but somehow distasteful, you think, "Okay this must
be normal for business," but it's not.

Just pick people the way you would pick people if you were
picking friends. This is one of those rare cases where it
works to be self indulgent. Work with people you would
generally like and respect and that you have known long
enough to be sure about because there are a lot of people
who are really good at seeming likable for a while

. Just wait till your interests are opposed and then you’ll see.

 The second counterintuitive point, this might come as a little

bit of a disappointment, but what you need to succeed in a
startup is not expertise in startups. That makes this class
different from most other classes you take. You take a
French class, at the end of it you've learned how to speech
French. You do the work, you may not sound exactly like a
French person, but pretty close, right? This class can teach
you about startups, but that is not what you need to know.
What you need to know to succeed in a startup is not
expertise in startups, what you need is expertise in your own
users.

Mark Zuckerberg did not succeed at Facebook because he

was an expert in startups, he succeeded despite being a
complete noob

at startups; I mean Facebook was first incorporated as a

Florida LLC. Even you guys know better than that.

He succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups

because he understood his users very well. Most of you
don't know the mechanics of raising an angel round, right? If
you feel bad about that, don't, because I can tell you Mark
Zuckerberg probably doesn't know the mechanics of raising
an angel round either; if he was even paying attention when

Ron Conway wrote him the big check, he probably has

forgotten about it by now.

In fact, I worry it's not merely unnecessary for people to

learn in detail about the mechanics of starting a startup, but
possibly somewhat dangerous because another
characteristic mistake of young founders starting startups is
to go through the motions of starting a startup. They come
up with some plausible sounding idea, they raise funding to
get a nice valuation, then the next step is they rent a nice
office in SoMa and hire a bunch of their friends, until they
gradually realize how completely fucked they are

because while imitating all the outward forms of starting a

startup, they have neglected the one thing that is actually
essential, which is to make something people want.

By the way that's the only use of that swear word, except
for the initial one, that was involuntary and I did check with
Sam if it would be okay; he said he had done it several
times, I mean use the word.

We saw this happen so often, people going through the

motion of starting a startup, that we made up a name for it:
"Playing House." Eventually I realized why it was
happening, the reason young founders go though the
motions of starting a startup is because that is what they
have been trained to do, their whole life, up to this point.
Think about what it takes to get into college: extracurricular
activities? Check. Even in college classes most of the work
you do is as artificial as running laps, and I'm not attacking
the educational system for being this way, inevitably the
work that you do to learn something is going to have some
amount of fakeness to it. And if you measure people’s
performance they will inevitably exploit the difference to the
degree that what you’re measuring is largely an artifact of
the fakeness.

I confess that I did this myself in college; in fact, here is a

useful tip on getting good grades. I found that in a lot of
classes there might only be twenty or thirty ideas that had
the right shape to make good exam questions. So the way I
studied for exams in these classes was not to master the
material in the class, but to try and figure out what the exam
questions would be and work out the answers in advance.
For me the test was not like, what my answers would be on
my exam, for me the test was which of my exam questions
would show up on the exam. So I would get my grade
instantly, I would walk into the exam and look at the
questions and see how many I got right, essentially. It works
in a lot of classes, especially CS classes. I remember

automata theory, there are only a few things that make

sense to ask about automata theory.

So it's not surprising that after being effectively trained for

their whole lives to play such games, young founders' first
impulse on starting a startup is to find out what the tricks are
for this new game. What are the extracurricular activities of
startups, what are things I have to do? They always want to
know, since apparently the measure of success for a startup
is fundraising, another noob mistake. They always want to
know, what are the tricks for convincing investors? And we
have to tell them the best way to convince investors is to
start a startup that is actually doing well, meaning growing
fast, and then simply tell investors so.

Then they ask okay, so what are the tricks for growing fast,
and this is exacerbated by the existence of this term,
"Growth Hacks." Whenever you hear somebody talk about
Growth Hacks, just mentally translate it in your mind
to "bullshit,"

because what we tell them is the way to make your startup

grow is to make something that users really love, and then
tell them about it. So that's what you have to do: that's
Growth Hacks right there.

So many of the conversations the YC partners have with the

founders begin with the founders saying a sentence that
begins with, "How do I," and the partners answering with a
sentence that begins with, "Just." Why do they make things
so complicated? The reason, I realized, after years of being
puzzled by this, is they're looking for the trick, they've been
trained to look for the trick.

So, this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about

startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system
stops working.

Gaming the system may continue to work, if you go to work

for a big company, depending on how broken the company
is, you may be able to succeed by sucking up to the right
person; Giving the impression of productivity by sending
emails late at night, or if you're smart enough changing the
clock on your computer, cause who's going to check the
headers, right? I like an audience I can tell jokes to and they
laugh. Over in the business school: "headers?" Okay, God
this thing is being recorded, I just realized that.

Alright for now on we are sticking strictly to the script. But, in

startups, that does not work. There is no boss to trick, how
can you trick people, when there is nobody to trick? There
are only users and all users care about is whether your

 software does what they want, right? They're like sharks,

sharks are too stupid to fool, you can't wave a red flag and
fool it, it's like meat or no meat. You have to have what
people want and you only prosper to the extent that you
do. The dangerous thing is, especially for you guys, the
dangerous thing is that faking does work to some extent
with investors.

If you’re really good at knowing what you’re talking about,

you can fool investors, for one, maybe two rounds of
funding, but it's not in your interest to do. I mean, you're all
doing this for equity, you're puling a confidence trick on
yourself. Wasting your own time, because the startup is
doomed and all you’re doing is wasting your time writing it
down.

So, stop looking for the trick. There are tricks in startups, as
there are in any domain, but they are an order of magnitude
less important than solving the real problem. Someone who
knows zero about fundraising, but has made something
users really love, will have an easier time raising money
than someone who knows every trick in the book, but has a
flat usage graph.
Though, in a sense, it's bad news that gaming the system
stops working now, in the sense that you're deprived of your
most powerful weapons and, after all, you spent twenty
years mastering them. I find it very exciting that there even
exist parts of the world where gaming the system is not how

you win. I would have been really excited in college if I

explicitly realized that there are parts of the world where
gaming the system matters less than others, and some
where it hardly matters at all. But there are, and this is one
of the most important thing to think about when planning
your future. How do you win at each type of work, and what
do you want to win by doing it?

That brings us to our fourth counterintuitive point, startups

are all consuming.

If you start a startup, it will take over your life

to a degree that you cannot imagine and if it succeeds it will

take over your life for a long time; for several years, at the
very least, maybe a decade, maybe the rest of your working
life. So there is a real opportunity cost here. It may seem to
you that Larry Page has an enviable life, but there are parts
of it that are defiantly unenviable. The way the world looks
to him is that he started running as fast as he could, at age
twenty-five, and he has not stopped to catch his breath
since. Every day shit happens within the Google empire that
only the emperor can deal with and he, as the emperor, has
to deal with it.

If he goes on vacation for even a week, a whole backlog of

shit accumulates, and he has to bear this, uncomplaining,
because: number one, as the company’s daddy, he cannot

 show fear or weakness; and number two, if you’re a

billionaire, you get zero, actually less than zero sympathy, if
you complain about having a difficult life.

Which has this strange side effect that the difficulty of being
a successful startup founder is concealed from almost
everyone who has done it. People who win the one-hundred
meter in the Olympics, you walk up to them and they're out
of breath. Larry Page is doing that too, but you never get to
see it.

Y Combinator has now funded several companies that could

be called big successes and in every single case the
founder says the same thing, "It never gets any easier." The
nature of the problems change, so you're maybe worrying
about more glamorous problems like construction delays in
your new London offices rather than the broken air
conditioner in your studio apartment, but the total volume of
worry never decreases. If anything, it increases.

Starting a successful startup is similar to having kids; it's like

a button you press and it changes your life irrevocably.
While it's honestly the best thing—having kids—if you take
away one thing from this lecture, remember this: There are a
lot of things that are easier to do before you have kids than

 after, many of which will make you a better parent when you
do have kids. In rich countries

, most people delay pushing the button

for a while and I'm sure you are all intimately familiar with
that procedure

Yet when it comes to starting startups a lot of people seem

to think they are supposed to start them in college. Are you
crazy?

What are the universities thinking – they go out of their way

to ensure that their students are well supplied with
contraceptives, and yet they are starting up
entrepreneurship programs and startup incubators left and
right.

To be fair, the universities have their hand forced here. A lot

of incoming students are interested in start-ups. Universities
are at least de-facto supposed to prepare you for your
career, and so if you're interested in startups, it seems like
universities are supposed to teach you about startups and if
they don't maybe they lose applicants to universities that do

claim to do that. So can universities teach you about

startups? Well, if not, what are we doing here?

Yes and no, as I've explained to you about start-ups.

Essentially, if you want to learn French, universities can
teach you linguistics. That is what this is. This is linguistics:
we're teaching you how to learn languages and what you
need to know is how a particular language.

What you need to know are the needs of your own users.
You can't learn those until you actually start the company,
which means that starting a startup is something you can
intrinsically only learn by doing it. You can't do that in college
for the reason I just explained. Startups take over your
entire life. If you start a startup in college, if you start a
startup as a student, you can't start a startup as a student
because if you start a startup you’re not a student anymore.
You may be nominally a student but you won't even be that
for very much longer. Given this dichotomy: which of the two
paths should you take?

Be a real student and not start a startup or start a real

startup and not be a student. Well, I can answer that one for
you. I'm talking to my own kids here. Do not start a startup in
college. I hope I'm not disappointing anyone seriously.
Starting a startup could be a good component of a good life
for a lot of ambitious people. This is just a part of a much
bigger problem that you are trying to solve. How to have a
good life, right. Those that are starting a startup could be a
good thing to do at some point. Twenty is not the optimal
time to do it.

There are things that you can do in your early twenties that
you cannot do as well before or after. Like plunge deeply
into projects on a whim that seem like they will have no pay
off. Travel super cheaply with no sense of a deadline. In fact
they are really isomorphic shapes in different domains.

For unambitious people your thing can be the dreaded

failure to launch. For the ambitious ones it’s a really
valuable sort of exploration and if you start a startup at
twenty and you are sufficiently successful you will never get
to do it.

Mark Zuckerberg will never get to bum around a foreign

country. If he goes to a foreign county, it's either as a de-
facto state visit or like he's hiding out incognito at George V
in Paris

. He's never going to just like backpack around Thailand if

that’s still what people do. Do people still backpack around
Thailand? That's the first real enthusiasm I've ever seen
from this class. Should have given this talk in Thailand. He
can do things you can't do, like charter jets to fly him to
foreign countries. Really big jets. But success has taken a
lot of the serendipity out of his life. Facebook is running him
as much as he's running Facebook.

While it can be really cool to be in the grip of some project

you consider your life's work, there are advantages
to serendipity

. Among other things, it gives you more options to choose

your life's work from. There's not even a trade off
here. You’re not sacrificing anything if you forgo starting a
start up at twenty because you will be more likely to
succeed if you wait.

In the astronomically unlikely case that you are twenty and

you have some side project that takes off like Facebook did,
then you face a choice to either be running with it or not and
maybe it’s reasonable to run with it. Usually the way that
start ups take off is for the founders to make them take off.
It's gratuitously stupid to do that at twenty.
Should you do it at any age? Starting a startup may sound
kind of hard, if I haven't made that clear let me try again.
Starting a startup is really hard. If it’s too hard, what if you
are not up to this challenge?

The answer is the fifth counter intuitive point. You can't tell.
Your life so far has given you some idea of what your
prospects might be if you wanted to become a
mathematician or a professional football player. Boy, it’s not
every audience you can say that to.

 Unless you have had a very strange life indeed you have
not done much that’s like starting a startup. Meaning starting
a startup will change you a lot if it works out. So what you’re
trying to estimate is not just what you are, but what you
could become. And who can do that? Well, not me. for the
last nine years it was my job to try to guess (I wrote "predict"
in here and it came out as "guess"—that’s a very informative
Freudian slip

). Seriously it’s easy to tell how smart people are in ten

minutes. Hit a few tennis balls over the net, and do they hit
them back at you or into the net? The hard part and the
most important part was predicting how tough and ambitious
they would become.

There may be no one at this point who has more experience

than me in doing this. I can tell you how much an expert can
know about that. The answer is not much. I learned from
experience to keep completely open mind about which start
ups in each batch would turn out to be the stars.

The founders sometimes thought they knew. Some arrived

feeling confident that they would ace Y Combinator just as
they had aced every one of the few easy artificial tests they
had faced in life so far. Others arrived wondering what
mistake had caused them to be admitted and hoping that no
one discover it.

There is little to no correlation between these attitudes and

how things turn out. I've read the same is true in the military.

 The swaggering recruits are no more than likely to turn out

to be really tough than the quiet ones and probably for the
same reason. The tests are so different from tests in
people’s previous lives. If you are absolutely terrified of
starting a startup you probably shouldn’t do it.

Unless you are one of those people who gets off on doing
things you're afraid of

. Otherwise if you are merely unsure of whether you are

going to be able to do it, the only way to find out is to try

, just not now.

So if you want to start a startup one day, what do you do

now in college? There are only two things you need initially,
an idea and cofounders. The MO for getting both of those is
the same which leads to our sixth and last counterintuitive
point.

The way to get start up ideas is not to try to think of startup

ideas. I have written a whole essay on this and I am not
going to repeat the whole thing here.

But the short version is that if you make a conscious effort

to try to think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are

not only bad but bad and plausible sounding. Meaning you
and everybody else will be fooled by them. You'll waste a lot
of time before realizing they're no good. The way to come
up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of
trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas,
turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas
unconsciously. In fact, so unconsciously that you don't even
realize at first that they're startup ideas.

This is not only possible: Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple

all got started this way. None of these companies were
supposed to be companies at first, they were all just side
projects. The very best ideas almost always have to start as
side projects because they're always such outliers that your
conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.

How do you turn your mind into the kind that has startup
ideas unconsciously? One, learn about a lot of things that
matter. Two, work on problems that interest you. Three, with
people you like and or respect. That's the third part
incidentally, is how you get cofounders at the same time as
the idea. The first time I wrote that paragraph, instead of
learn a lot about things that matter, I wrote become good at
some technology. But that prescription is too narrow.

What was special about Brain Chesky and Joe Gebbia from
Airbnb was not that they were experts in technology. They
went to art school, they were experts in design. Perhaps
more importantly they were really good at organizing people
in getting projects done. So you don't have to work on
technology per se, so long as you work on things that
stretch you.

What kinds of things are those? Now that is very hard to

answer in the general case. History is full of examples of
young people who were working on problems that no one
else at the time thought were important. In particular that
their parents didn't think were important. On the other hand,
history is even fuller of examples of parents that thought
their kids were wasting their time and who were right.

How do you know if you’re working on real stuff? I mean

when Twitch TV switched from being Justin.tv to Twitch TV
and they were going to broadcast people playing video
games, I was like, "What?" But it turned out to be a good
business.

I know how I know real problems are interesting, and I am

self-indulgent: I always like working on anything interesting
things even if no one cares about them. I find it very hard to
make myself work on boring things even if they're supposed
to be important. My life is full of case after case where I
worked on things just because I was interested and they
turned out to be useful later in some worldly way.

Y Combinator itself is something I only did because it

seemed interesting. I seem to have some internal compass
that helps me out. This is for you not me and I don't know
what you have in your heads. Maybe if I think more about it I
can come up some heuristics for recognizing genuinely

interesting ideas. For now all I can give you is the

hopelessly question begging advice. Incidentally this is the
actual meaning of the phrase begging the question. The
hopelessly question begging advice that if you’re interested
in generally interesting problems, gratifying your interest
energetically is the best way to prepare yourself for a startup
and probably best way to live.

Although I can't explain in the general case what counts as

an interesting problem I can tell you about a large subset of
them. If you think of technology as something that’s
spreading like a sort of fractal stain, every point on the edge
represents an interesting problem. Steam engine not so
much maybe you never know. One guaranteed way to turn
your mind into the type to start up ideas for them
unconsciously. Is to get yourself to the leading edge of some
technology.

To, as Paul Buchheit put it, "Live in the future." And when
you get there, ideas that seem uncannily prescient to other
people will seem obvious to you. You may not realize they're
start up ideas, but you will know they are something that
ought to exist.

For example back at Harvard in the mid 90s. A fellow grad

student of my friends Robert and Trevor wrote his own voice
over IP software. It wasn't meant to be a startup, he never
tried to turn it into one. He just wanted to talk to his girlfriend
in Taiwan without paying for long distance calls. Since he
was an expert on networks, it seemed obvious to him that
thing to do was to turn the sound into packets and ship them
over the internet for free. Why didn't everybody do this?

They were not good at writing this type of software. He

never did anything with this. He never tried to turn this into a
startup. That is how the best startups tend to happen.

Strangely enough the optimal thing to do in college if you

want to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of
new vocational version of college focused on
entrepreneurship. It's the classic version of college is
education its own sake. If you want to start your own startup
what you should do in college is learn powerful things and if
you have genuine intellectual curiosity that’s what you’ll
naturally tend to do if you just follow your own
inclinations. The component of entrepreneurship, can never
quite say that word with a straight face,

that really matters is domain expertise. Larry Page is Larry

Page because he was an expert on search and the way he
became an expert on search was because he was
genuinely interested and not because of some ulterior
motive. At its best starting a startup is merely a ulterior
motive for curiosity and you’ll do it best if you introduce the
ulterior motive at the end of the process. So here is ultimate
advice for young would be startup founders reduced to two
words: just learn.

Alright how much time do we have left? Eighteen minutes

for questions good god. Do you guys have the questions?

Q: Sure we will start with two questions. How can a

nontechnical founder most efficiently contribute to a startup?

 A: If the startup is, if the startup is working in some domain,

if it’s not a pure technology startup but is working in some
very specific domain, like if it is Uber and the non technical
founder was an expert in the limo business then actually
then the non technical founder would be doing most of the
work.

Recruiting drivers and doing whatever else Uber has to do

and the technical founder would be just writing the iPhone
app which probably less, well iPhone and android app,
which is less than half of it. If it’s purely a technical start
up the non technical founder does sales and brings coffee
and cheeseburgers to the programmer

Q: Do you see any value in business school for people who

want to pursue entrepreneurship?

A: Basically no, it sounds undiplomatic, but business school

was designed to teach people management.

Management is a problem that you only have in a startup if

you are sufficiently successful. So really what you need to
know early on to make a start up successful is developing
products. You would be better off going to design school if
you would want to go to some sort of school. Although
frankly the way to learn how to do it is just to do it.

 One of the things I got wrong early on is that I advised

people who were interested in starting a startup to go work
for some other company for a few years before starting their
own

. Honestly the best way to learn on how to start a startup is

just to just try to start it.

You may not be successful but you will learn faster if you
just do it. Business schools are trying really hard to do this.
They were designed to train the officer core of large
companies, which is what business seemed to be back
when it was a choice to be either the officer core of large
companies or Joe's Shoe Store.

Then there was this new thing, Apple, that started as small
as Joe's Shoe Store and turns into this giant mega company
but they were not designed for that world they are good at
what they’re good at. They should just do that and screw
this whole entrepreneurship thing.

Q: Management is a problem only if you are successful.

What about those first two or three people?

A: Ideally you are successful before you even hire two or

three people. Ideally you don't even have two or three
people for quite awhile. When you do the first hires in a

startup they are almost like founders. They should be

motivated by the same things, they can’t be people you
have to manage. This is not like the office, these have to be
your peers, you shouldn’t have to manage them much.

Q: So is it just a big no no, someone has to be managed no

way they should be on the founding team.

A: In the case were you are doing something were you need
some super advanced technical thing and there is
some boffin that knows this thing and no one else in this
world including on how to wipe his mouth. It may be to your
advantage to hire said boffin

and wipe his mouth for him. As a general rule you want
people who are self motivated early on they should just be
like founders.

Q: Do you think we are currently in a bubble?

A: I’ll give you two answers to this question. One, ask me

questions that are useful to this audience because these
people are here to learn how to start startups, and I have
more data in my head than anybody else and you're asking
me questions a reporter does because they cannot think of
anything interesting to ask

. I will answer your question. There is a difference between

prices merely being high and a bubble. A bubble is a very
specific form of prices being high where people knowingly
pay high prices for something in the hope that they will be
able to unload it later on some greater fool. That's what
happened in the late 90's, when VC's knowingly invested in
bullshit startups thinking that they would be able to take
those things public and unload them on other retail investors
before everything blew up

I was there for that at the epicenter of it all. That is not what
is happening today. Prices are high, valuations are high, but
valuations being high does not mean a bubble. Every
commodity has prices that go up and down in some sort of
sine wave. Definitely prices are high. We tell people if you
raise money, don't think the next time you raise money it’s
going to be so easy, who knows maybe between now and
then the Chinese economy will have exploded then there's a
giant disaster recession. Assume the worst. But bubble? No.

Q: I am seeing a trend among young people and successful

entrepreneurs where they don’t want to start one great
company but twenty. You are starting to see a rise in these
labs attempts were they are going to try to launch a whole
bunch of stuff, I don't have any stellar examples yet.

A: Do you mean like IDEO?

Q: No, like Idealab

, Garrett Camp’s new one

 ...

A: Oh yeah. There's this new thing were people start labs

that are supposed to spin off startups. It might work, that's
how Twitter started. In fact, I meant Idealab, not IDEO, that
was another Freudian slip. Twitter was not Twitter at first.
Twitter was a side project at a company called Odeo that
was supposed to be in the podcasting business, and you
like podcasting business, do those words even
grammatically go together? The answer turned out to be no
as Evan discovered. As a side project they spun off Twitter
and boy was that a dog wagging tail, people are starting
these things that are supposed to spin off startups, will it
work? Quite possibly if the right people do it. You can't do it
though, because you have to do it with your own money.

Q: What advice do you have for female co-founders as they

are pursuing funding?

A: It probably is true that women have a harder time raising

money.

I have noticed this empirically and Jessica is just about to

publish a bunch of interviews on female founders and a lot
of them said that they thought they had a harder time raising
money, too. Remember I said the way to raise money?
Make your start up actually do well and that's just especially
true in any case if you miss the ideal target from the VC's
point of view in any respect. The way to solve that problem

is make the startup do really well. In fact, there was a point

a year or two ago when I tweeted this growth graph of this
company and I didn't say who they were. I knew it would get
people to start asking and it was actually a female founded
startup that was having trouble raising money, but their
growth graph was stupendous. So I tweeted it, knowing all
these VC's would start asking me, “Who is that?”
Growth graphs have no gender, so if they see the growth
graph first, let them fall in love with that.

Do well, which is generally good advice for all startups.

Q: What would you learn in college right now?

A: Literary theory, no just kidding.

Honestly, I think I might try and study physics that’s the

thing I feel I missed. For some reason, when I was a kid
computers were the thing, maybe they still are. I got very
excited learning to write code and you can write real
programs in your bedroom. You can't build real accelerators,
well maybe you can. Maybe physics, I noticed I sort of look
longingly at physics so maybe. I don't know if that’s going to
be helpful starting a startup and I just told you to follow your
own curiosity so who cares if it's helpful, it'll turn out to be
helpful.

Q: What are your reoccurring systems in your work and

personal life that make you efficient?

A: Having kids is a good way to be efficient. Because you

have no time left so if you want to get anything done, the
amount of done you do per time is high. Actually many
parents, start up founders who have kids have made that
point explicitly. They cause you to focus because you have
no choice.

I wouldn't actually recommend having kids just to make you

more focused. You know, I don't think I am very efficient, I
have two ways of getting work done. One is during Y
Combinator, the way I worked on Y Combinator is I was
forced to. I had to set the application deadline, and then
people would apply, and then there were all these
applications that I had to respond to by a certain time. So I
had to read them and I knew if I read them badly, we would
get bad startups so I tried really hard to read them well. So I
set up this situation that forced me to work. The other kind
of work I do is writing essays. And I do that voluntarily, I am
walking down the street and the essay starts writing itself in
my head. I either force myself to work on less exciting
things; I can't help working on exciting things. I don't have
any useful techniques for making myself efficient. If you
work on things you like, you don't have to force yourself to
be efficient.

Q: When is a good time to turn a side project into a startup?

A: You will know, right. So the question is when you turn a

side project into a startup, you will know that it is becoming
a real startup when it takes over a alarming large
percentage of your life, right.

 My god I've just spent all day working on this thing that’s
supposed to be a side project, I am going to fail all of my
classes what am I going to do, right. Then maybe it’s turning
into a startup.

Q: I know you talked a lot, earlier, about you'll know when

your start up is doing extremely well, but I feel like in a lot of
cases it's a gray line, where you have some users but not
explosive growth that is up and to the right, what would you
do or what would you recommend in those situations?
Considering allocating time and resources, how do you
balance?

A: When a start up is growing but not much. Didn't you tell

them they were supposed to read Do Things that Don't
Scale?

You sir have not done the readings, you are busted.
Because there are four, I wrote a whole essay answered
that question and that is to do things that don't scale. Just
go read that, because I can't remember everything I said.
It's about exactly that problem.

Q: What kind of startup should not go through incubation, in

your opinion?

A: Definitely any that will fail. Or if you'll succeed but you're

an intolerable person. That also Sam would probably sooner

do without. Short of that, I cannot think of any, because a

large percentage, founders are often surprised by how large
a percentage of the problems that start ups have are the
same regardless of what type of thing they're working on.
And those tend to be kind of problems that YC helps the
most not the ones that are domain specific. Can you think of
the class of startups? That YC wouldn't work for? We
had fission and fusion startups

in the last batch.

Q: You mentioned that it's good advice to learn a lot about

something that matters, what are some good strategies to
figure out what matters?

A: If you think of technology as something that’s spreading

as a sort of fractal stain. Anything on the edge represents an
interesting idea, sounds familiar. Like I said that was the
problem, you have correctly identified the thing I didn't really
answer the question were I gave this question begging
answer. I said I'm interested in interesting things and you
said you were interested in interesting things, work on them
and things will work out.

How do you tell what is a real problem

? I don't know, that's like important enough to write a whole

essay about. I don't know the answer and I probably should
write something about that, but I don't know. I figured out a
technique for detecting whether you have a taste for

generally interesting problems. Which is whether you find

working on boring things intolerable

and there are known boring things. Like literary theory

and working in middle management in some large

company. So if you can tolerate those things, then you
must have

stupendous self-discipline or you don't have a taste for

genially interesting problems and vice versa.

Q: Do you like Snapchat?

A: Snapchat? What do I know about Snapchat? We didn't

fund them. I want another question.

Q: If you hire people you like, you might get a monoculture

and how do you deal with the blind spots that arise?

A: Starting a startup is where many things will be going

wrong. You can't expect it to be perfect. The advantage is of
hiring people you know and like are far greater than the
small disadvantage of having some monoculture.

 You look at it empirically, at all the most successful startups,

someone just hires all their pals out of college.

Alright you guys thank you.