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Speaker 1

00:00

Okay. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Work at a Startup. This is the first time we've done this conference since 2012. So it's a pretty special day for us, and I'm really excited to see that we had such an amazing turnout.

Speaker 1

00:14

In a moment, I'm going to introduce our first keynote speaker, Justin Kahn. He is the founder of 3 YC companies. He is now running a company called Atrium, which you're going to hear about later this afternoon. But before that, he was the founder of Justin.TV, and he actually presented up here on this stage 8 years ago, back when he was running Justin.tv.

Speaker 1

00:34

And he's going to tell you some really awesome stories from what happened back then, and talk about why you should or should not work for a startup. So, please welcome Justin Khan.

Speaker 2

00:52

Thank you, Jared, for giving away my talk. It's me, Justin Khan. I am YC's remedial student.

Speaker 2

01:02

I had lost track, actually, of the number of times I'd been through YC until Jared reminded me. It's been 3 times, actually 4 at least. And some of those companies worked, some of them didn't. And my newest company, which went through YC in the last batch in winter 2018 is called Atrium.

Speaker 2

01:22

1 of my team members will be up to tell you about that later. But what I want to talk about today, and it was supposed to be a surprise twist but no longer, is why you should but also why you shouldn't join a startup. And I'm gonna start with why you shouldn't join. Okay, there's a couple reasons.

Speaker 2

01:40

And my goal here is just to give you the most unfiltered, raw feelings that I have to help you make an informed decision. But there's lots of good reasons why you shouldn't join a startup. Number 1, the management at startups generally really sucks. I wish I was joking, but no, it's true.

Speaker 2

02:02

I used to joke that there were YC companies, there were 2 kinds of YC companies. There were the rocket ships with bad management and then there were the other companies with bad management. And as kind of a corollary to that, It is likely that if you join a startup, especially in early stage 1, you won't necessarily get enough mentorship or direction on what you're doing unless you really actively force people to give it to you. Second reason, you are likely to not actually get rich joining a startup.

Speaker 2

02:36

It's statistically improbable that if you think you're gonna join a startup and then be set for life, that is unlikely to happen. So that would not be a good reason to join. I'm sorry I ever told you different. And then the third reason, which I think is a new reason in Silicon Valley actually, is as Silicon Valley has matured in the last 10 years since Jared and I have kind of gotten here, 1 of the things that I think has changed is people, you know, originally when I got here, I think people just wanted to work on interesting shit.

Speaker 2

03:06

And it was a much smaller number of people. Now, I think that there's a lot of people who come to Silicon Valley because it's a great career. And there's a great trajectory and there's stability. And if you want, like, those things, you should not join a startup.

Speaker 2

03:24

I've noticed more and more people, even people I've recruited more recently, coming in and saying, what's the career pathing here? What's the five-year plan? And I'm like, we don't have 5 years of money. So if you want stability, I think you should go join Facebook.

Speaker 2

03:44

Maybe not today, but next week. All right, so now on to what you really came for, which is why you should join a startup. And I when I was writing this in the parking lot 5 minutes ago, identified 3 reasons. All right.

Speaker 2

04:01

Number 1, you will get access to jobs that you're completely unqualified for and you might not be able to do. So my example actually comes from that very first work for a startup. 8 years ago, I was on stage talking about Justin.TV, and we actually recruited someone from that. And his name was Guillaume.

Speaker 2

04:22

He was from France, programmer. And actually, he came to WorkForce Startup and got 2 offers from 2 different companies. 1 was Justin.TV, and 1 was actually Scribd, Jared's company. And I sat down with him, I remember, in a coffee shop after work for a startup and he said, oh, I have this offer from Scribd.

Speaker 2

04:40

And I said, what was it? He told me, I was like, I'll pay you $10,000 more right now to sign this instant. And so he accepted, sorry Jared. He accepted and he joined Justin.tv and within a year he was running our entire Rails backend for a site that was like a top 100 site and I think a top 10 to 20 Rails site at the time, it was like in 2010, so the bar was a lot lower.

Speaker 2

05:07

And that was a job he was like completely unqualified for, and he would never have gotten the opportunity to do if he didn't join a startup where we didn't really have anyone else to do it. And he went on, actually, this is a pretty cool story, he went on, we spun out a company called social cam a couple years later he went on to be a co-founder of that company as we spun it out of Justin TV went through YC and Got an even greater scale challenge when they scaled to, like from 0 to 128 million users in like 2 months. And so, you know, just the rate of learning for him was like pretty incredible. And he's gone on to, now he's a co-founder at a company called Triple Byte that does recruiting for YC companies and others.

Speaker 2

05:47

Okay, so that's number 1. You are going to get access to jobs you are not qualified for. Number 2 is joining a startup is a really good gateway to starting your own startup, if that's a goal of yours. In the second workforce startup, we in 2012, I came back with another company called Exec.

Speaker 2

06:07

And I recruited someone else, actually, someone really talented. His name was Finn Bar, and he was an engineer at Groupon at the time. And I think he really wanted to break into startups with the idea of eventually starting his own. And I think 1 of the things that's really important is to just put yourself in positions where you're around people who want to do the things that you want to do, or people who are like the person that you want to become.

Speaker 2

06:31

1 of my co-founders of Twitch, his name is Emmett, always told me that you are the average of your 5 closest friends. And he wasn't talking about just me, he was talking about everybody in general. And I really think that's the case. So Finbar went on, he was like, you know, working at Exec, that company didn't work out super good, but he ended up meeting a co-founder there and starting a startup, which was a horrible idea.

Speaker 2

06:54

It was a terrible idea. I told him not to do it at the time. But he ended up getting his start, right? He was like, he became a founder, That didn't work out.

Speaker 2

07:02

He ended up joining YC for, I think, just over a year, and then started a new startup that just went through YC and is off to the races and doing super good. I won't give away that. It's called Shogun. You should check it out and probably work there.

Speaker 2

07:16

Okay, so starting your own startup, that's the second reason. The third thing is to maximize your, I should slow down, I still have a lot of time, sorry. The third thing is to maximize your own speed of learning. I think this is actually the most important reason why you should join a startup.

Speaker 2

07:38

And I've kind of 2 examples of people who did that working with me. And they are both the 2 co-founders of Cruise. And I think that they're cool examples because 1 is kind of maximizing learning on the way up and the other on the way down. I'll explain what that means.

Speaker 2

07:59

So The first co-founder of Cruise, his name's Kyle Vogt. We recruited him at Justin.TV in the early days. He was an MIT student and we had found him and he was like kind of this person that we thought we needed because he was a hardware hacker and we thought we were gonna build a hardware company. And so we convinced him to come out from MIT for his month-long break during January.

Speaker 2

08:24

And we bought him a one-way ticket. And we were like, just work for a month. And then we never bought him a ticket back. And Kyle basically became our VP engineering.

Speaker 2

08:38

And he became a co-founder actually in the VP engineering. And Kyle's an amazing hacker. He always has been very amazing tinkerer, and 1 of those people with a can-do attitude is just going to, if you're like, hey, let's build this thing, he's going to go figure out how to build it. But he didn't know jack shit about scaling systems or building scalable system architectures.

Speaker 2

09:01

And so that was the job that was available, though as soon as we stopped, we figured out that we should not build hardware. And so that was, that's the job we kind of assigned him and he had to figure it out really like on the fly. And so he ended up, you know packing this live video system There was nothing kind of There was nothing there was there was there was like no precedent right? We basically built this scalable dynamic live video system that he engineered and architected, mostly badly at first actually, and it would go down all the time.

Speaker 2

09:39

We ended up, there was this 1 kind of funny story where we had no idea about, we had no idea how to build reliable systems. And so every time it would go down, we would call him, which was like every 36 to 48 hours. And so he could never go on vacation, which is not really acceptable to him. So it was just like 1 time he was just like, I'm going, goodbye, basically.

Speaker 2

10:05

And we're like, no, what's gonna happen if you're not around? He ends up, he went to Tahoe or something like that. We ended up, of course, like Clockwork, after 36 hours the site went down. And We had no, we were calling him on the phone at like 10 times.

Speaker 2

10:20

It's a live video site, so if it doesn't work, it doesn't have any value, right, like just right then. So we started calling him and he didn't pick up. Luckily, he had left the address. We ended up having to order a pizza to go to his house to read a message to him like a pizza delivery driver read the message like answer your phone the website is down so like that was like our concept of like a pager system at the time right so really figuring everything out way 1 step at a time kind of inventing everything from scratch The end of the story is he eventually architected this live video system that by the time Twitch sold to Amazon in 2014, was the fourth largest bandwidth consumer in North America, 15 points of presence around the world, did 90 petabytes of data transfer a month.

Speaker 2

11:06

And so, you know, I mean, his rate of learning was incredible as a software architect, and obviously kind of went on and took a lot of that to Cruise, which is also an incredible story. The other cofounder of Cruise was my brother, Daniel, who met Kyle actually as an intern at Justin TV when he was a college student. We recruited him. Not really recruited.

Speaker 2

11:31

It was more like nepotism. I'm sorry, I hope he's not watching right now. That's fucked up, that's fucked up to say. So no, he also had a crash course in startups over the next couple years.

Speaker 2

11:48

He didn't work for me for very long, but when he did work for me, he recruited these guys to the site. I remember, Justin TV, when we were doing the kind of live streaming site, he recruited this unknown band. It was called the Jonas Brothers. And they ended up crashing our site.

Speaker 2

12:07

I mean, they were part of the reason that Kyle hated his life. Ended up crashing the site over and over again. But the cool thing was he joined as this intern. He got to interact and kind of make a deal with what was basically became the number 1 teen band at the time in 2007.

Speaker 2

12:23

And then later on you know he joined me as a co-founder when I started this other company exec in 2012. And the cool thing you know I mentioned it you know Kyle's kind of the example of how you might learn at a startup as the startup's growing and on the way up. I think Daniel's a perfect example of how you will also learn and maximize your learning if the startup is completely and horribly failing. Because in 2013, by the time we had worked on exec for a couple years We realized that the home cleaning business is not a great business.

Speaker 2

12:55

I'd recommend you don't join a home cleaning startup and He we ended up trying to sell it. And this is a great story. This is my last story. This is a great story.

Speaker 2

13:06

So we were trying to sell it. We ended up negotiating a deal with a company called Handy that's in the East Coast and against all odds has survived in this industry. And we negotiated the deal. And it was taking forever.

Speaker 2

13:21

There was tons of lawyers. It was dragging and dragging and dragging. And I was so burned out, I was just like, I'm going on vacation, Daniel. You have to deal with it.

Speaker 2

13:30

It's not a very responsible thing to do, but. And so he ended up having to be the 1 who closed this deal over the next like month while I was in Thailand. I mean, I was like kind of doing stuff on the phone, but he was mostly like running this deal for not a lot of money, you know, just a bit of stock from handy. And he ended up, it was a horrible experience.

Speaker 2

13:52

He learned all about negotiating, and when you want to have leverage in a deal, when you should, all the things, all the different minutiae of negotiating a deal. And he learned it on this very small, horrible deal which we were mostly just trying to offload because we were so burned out, we wanted to get out of the business. 2 years later, fast forward 2 years, he had become a co-founder of Cruise. Cruise had built an amazing technology team that was executing super well.

Speaker 2

14:21

And you guys know the end of the story. They ended up selling to GM for a billion dollars. And he applied, the cool thing, I think, is that Daniel applied all of those horrible lessons he learned from trying to negotiate this shitty, piddling deal for our company to his next company. And ended up, they sold it for over a billion dollars.

Speaker 2

14:39

So you're gonna learn something. Whether the company succeeds or fails, you'll probably walk away with something valuable. The last thing I'll say is that the way I think about it is, the way I think about growing and like your speed of learning maximizing your speed of learning is from a quote that our YC partner Paul Buhite had generally said, I think he says it to every batch, which is that it's not your Y intercept, but it's your slope that's important. And so I think you wanna, the way I've always thought about it is, how do I figure out ways that I can put myself in the position to maximize my own personal rate of growth and rate of learning and I Suggest that you do the same regardless of whether that's at a startup or not.

Speaker 2

15:24

All right Best of luck Next up. I'm supposed to introduce you. I'm sorry, I forgot. Next, we have YC president Sam Altman.

Speaker 3

15:47

All right. Justin covered a lot of what I was going to talk about, so I'm going to have time for questions. That was awesome, though.

Speaker 3

15:52

So I want to talk about how to pick which startup to work at. The most important considerations you all already know. Picking a company you're excited about, people you're excited about, a role you're excited about, that's more important than the rest of the stuff I have to say, but that's also intuitive. And so I'm gonna talk about the things that are not intuitive, or at least haven't been for me.

Speaker 3

16:15

And I wanna just echo 1 thing that Justin said because I think it is so important. Every job I have ever had and probably every job Justin has ever had as well, I will speak for myself, I have been wildly unqualified for. Doing that, I think, is the number 1 secret to having a really great career. Like that's the way you have a super fast rate of personal growth.

Speaker 3

16:38

And I think the way careers go is you should put in the most of the effort at the beginning. Because it's this compound interest like thing, where the work you do now, the learning you do now, the improvement you make early in your career gets to pay off for all the rest. So you may as well work hard and take a chance on a role that you feel unqualified for early. And if you flame out, you flame out and you go try something different.

Speaker 3

16:59

But my experience is when someone does a role they're unqualified for, it either goes way worse or way better than expectations. And a lot of the times it goes way better. And if you hold yourself back from doing this because you're afraid of not working out, which is totally understandable, sometimes it doesn't, I think you miss this opportunity to have the sort of most impactful career you can. And that is what's so cool about startups, is you can get jobs you are wildly unqualified for.

Speaker 3

17:26

So I want to talk about how to pick a startup. And I want to talk about this from the perspective of being an investor. Because I think what you're doing when you go to work at a startup is making 1 big investment. If you're really good, you are going to take way less cash comp you can than you could get at Google or Facebook.

Speaker 3

17:45

And you are going to be compensated for that by investing your time in the startup in return for equity. So people have different risk-reward trade-offs. You might want a later stage startup with this lower risk or return. You might want higher risk, high return, a very early stage startup.

Speaker 3

17:58

But I think the right framework of this is to think about it like you're investing in a startup. And for me at least, learning to invest in startups was deeply counterintuitive. And I'm going to talk about 8 things that I learned about how to evaluate startups for investment. This mostly applies to sort of the stage of startups you'll see here today.

Speaker 3

18:19

Number 1, this is a Paul Buhite, another Paul Buhitism. It's more important that a startup have a small number of users that really love the product, rather than a lot of users that really like the product. Most startups either have no 1 who cares at all or a lot of people who are like, yeah, that's okay. Very rare to find a startup where people love the product so much they spontaneously tell their friends.

Speaker 3

18:41

But if you think about the really big companies today, Google, Facebook, you probably heard about it because someone was like, this is awesome. You've got to sign up. And people talk about product market fit, all this other stuff. I think it's sort of hard to evaluate.

Speaker 3

18:54

But 1 thing you can do is either like talk to some users of the company, or ideally you are 1 yourself or know some, and like, is this product so good that people are telling other people they've got to use it? And that I think matters much more than the vanity metrics, number of users, current growth rate, whatever that most startups throw around. So if you only do 1 piece of diligence, this is the 1 I would do. Number 2, trusting exponential growth.

Speaker 3

19:21

And as a byproduct of that, trusting momentum. Momentum is sort of this really important concept to startups. If things are feeling good, if it's growing, if people are loving the product, If good people are joining, that tends to keep going. And if that falters, it's very hard to get it back.

Speaker 3

19:36

So does the startup have a good sense of momentum? And is there some sort of exponential growth model? By the way, I've been investing in startups for like, I don't know, 8 or 10 years now. I still have not managed to get good at intuiting exponential growth in my head.

Speaker 3

19:50

So I have to do it in a spreadsheet every time. But I've learned to trust it. And if it's if a startup is growing exponentially, and it's not fake, it's not like, you know, they're buying all the users or something, it tends to keep going. And making that leap of faith, because almost no 1 understands just how powerful exponential growth is, even if they say out loud they do, making the leap of faith and trusting that is super valuable.

Speaker 3

20:17

Related concept, this is the third 1. The size of the market today matters almost not at all. It is the growth rate of the market and how big the market will be in 10 years. So I think the number 1 mistake investors make when they miss out on a really great opportunity is they look at the size of the market today.

Speaker 3

20:35

Now, they only care about how fast a startup is growing. They don't care about the size of the revenue today and why they can't make this same leap of faith for the market, I've never understood. But if you make a really great decision on what startup to join, it will probably be a smallish market today that's growing really quickly. You know, I saw this morning on the way down here, this is like the 10 year anniversary of the iPhone App Store.

Speaker 3

20:59

So 10 years ago, not very long, The size of the market for iPhone applications was $0. And a lot of investors, somewhat rationally, but obviously wrongly, said, all right, well, we're not investing in these iPhone apps because this is a small market. I also saw this morning the uber deck when they first raised money and they said, you know Their tam is like 2000000000 dollars or something. And if you think about the world from a certain set of constraints, that was true But it turns out that like The market of people that want to move around cities easily grows quickly when you have a better product.

Speaker 3

21:35

So thinking about the growth rate of the market, not just the growth rate of the startup, super important if you're going to identify something really big. And a related concept to that is the biggest companies that we have been able to be a part of, and I think the biggest companies in the technology industry as a whole, happen when there's a technological platform shift. So for example, stick with the iPhone example, the iPhone app store launches in 2008. In a period of say 2009 to 2012, there were a lot of companies that you could never have started before and that all of a sudden you could.

Speaker 3

22:15

Uber's a good example, but there's other ones like Snapchat, which really just didn't quite make sense before mobile phones and apps. And so trying to identify these platform shifts, that's another place where I think you can find almost all of the big startups. Most people are wrong about this, So you have to learn to trust your own intuitions here. It's very hard to differentiate between real trends and fake trends.

Speaker 3

22:43

The technology journalists in particular seem easy to trick about this, but honestly, so is everybody. And so if you read the news, you're not going to find the answer here. If you talk to most people, you're not going to find the answer here. But if you think hard and you really pay attention, sometimes you can.

Speaker 3

22:58

The metric that I use to differentiate between a real trend and a fake trend is similar to loving a product. It's when is there a new platform that people are using many hours every day. So the iPhone comes out, not that many people buy it, but they use it all day. VR headsets come out.

Speaker 3

23:14

A lot of people buy it, but they never come off the shelf. So VR, by that metric, is not yet a real trend. And at the point where people start having their headset on hours a day, that might be a good time to start a VR company. The fifth consideration, Is the company exciting?

Speaker 3

23:32

And here's why that's important. The hardest thing to get, especially right now in Silicon Valley, is a critical mass of talented people at 1 company. It's easy to get the first few employees. You can give them a ton of equity, give them big job titles.

Speaker 3

23:45

But that stops to work. And then you get to employee 30, employee 300. Why are they still going to join, rather than start their own startup, join a small startup, go to Google? And this ability to have an exciting enough mission to be able to concentrate talent.

Speaker 3

24:02

This is why I think it's easier to start a hard startup than an easy startup, because people care. And if you don't have this, it's really hard. I have basically in my life had to recruit a lot for 2 different startups. 1 was a company I started a long time ago that did social networking on iPhones, and another was OpenAI.

Speaker 3

24:21

In the first 1, we could tell people, hey, you should come do this. It's really cool. And it was kind of cool. And OpenAI, we can say, like, you know, If we don't do a good job, or if someone does not do a good job building AGI, the world will very likely get destroyed, and we need you specifically to do this piece of it, and if you don't do that, it's really bad for the world.

Speaker 3

24:41

And that is a really hard pitch to say no to. And So a startup that has a reason why people need to join it is super powerful. The sixth 1 is thinking about how impressed you are by the founders and the early employees at the startup. So as a general observation, it is extremely powerful whenever you can identify something in the world that is true and important and that most people don't believe.

Speaker 3

25:10

And in fact, I think this is 1 of the 2 major market inefficiencies that startups get to exploit. There exists a small number of founders in the world that are so good that they end up bending the world to their will. And they can do this without a lot of business experience. And they are like hundreds of times more effective than people that aren't like this.

Speaker 3

25:31

And you know, there are programmers that are, I know people hate the 10x engineer meme because it's so often used to justify being a jerk, but there are plenty of people who are 10 times as good as average programmers and also nice people. And in companies where you find a lot of these people concentrated in the early hires, this is a huge deal. And these startups consistently outperform. And the quality of the early people at a company, the quality of the founders, is so determinant of success, and it has such a bigger impact than people like to believe or want to believe about the world that when you find this, it is 1 of these secrets about the world that is critically important and that people try not to believe.

Speaker 3

26:11

So I think that's a really great thing to look for. The other big market inefficiency to look for is ideas that sound bad but are good. So most ideas that sound bad are unfortunately bad, and you should try not to join those companies. But there exists a class, and this is where YC has made most of its money, of ideas that sound bad but are good.

Speaker 3

26:37

If an idea is good and sounds good, then the big companies will try to do it and usually outcompete you. But there's a really important difference between startups and big companies. If you have the same idea at a big company, and you want to do it, you have to get your boss to say yes, your boss's boss to say yes, your boss's boss to say yes, and then Sundar to say yes, and then Larry Page to say yes. And in that chain of 20, 1 no kills the entire idea.

Speaker 3

27:03

And if the idea sounds bad, someone will, rationally so, say no. If you're a startup, you may also have 20 conversations, you may go up and down Sand Hill Road trying to convince someone to fund it, But you only need 1 yes. And the 1 yes, you get to go do it. Even if it's 19 no's.

Speaker 3

27:22

It's very different than what has to happen at a big company. So 1 idea I often ask startups is can you tell me why this idea sounds bad to the big companies, but actually is good. And then a final thing that I look at are what, this has been a long standing YC metric. What are the smartest sort of recent college graduates excited about?

Speaker 3

27:49

In our experience now over more than 13 years that YC has been in business, that group of people consistently is 3, 4 years ahead of what investors focus on. And that has been a model for us of identifying real trends before they happen. That group is not always right. There have been some big failures.

Speaker 3

28:09

But directionally speaking, young people, I think, have more time, they're more on the forefront of technology, they're less set in their ways, whatever it's for, that, you know, what those people are going into is an area that we have always looked at. So another question that's related to all of this is how to get good advice about what startup to join. You have to choose the peers whose opinion you care about in your life very, very carefully. Most people will have bring whatever biases they have about what a career should look like or what a safe choice is or what a good thing to work on is.

Speaker 3

28:52

They'll bring all that to the table. And most people have let bad processes in behind their firewall and they will give you bad advice. And so trying to find a group of people that you can go to in your lives whenever you have a big career decision that are kind of open-minded and intellectually rigorous thinkers and who care about the similar kinds of things that you care about, whatever that is, is a really valuable thing to do. I was lucky to find a handful of those people very early in my life.

Speaker 3

29:20

I still ping them on every big decision. And the advice that they give me, I think, is generally quite good and very different than what I'd get from most of my friends. So finding people who can give you good advice about what startup to join is really important. I was going to talk about how to think about equity at a startup, but I only have 1 minute left.

Speaker 3

29:40

So I will say this. You probably aren't getting enough. I think most Startups are not nearly generous enough with employee equity. The difference, the amount of value that you create as an early employee versus a founder is not the 100X difference that you usually see reflected on a cap table.

Speaker 3

29:59

We try to get YC startups to be more generous with equity, and I think over time it's trending in that direction. But remember, startups need really talented people. Startups need people that could otherwise go work at Google and make a gigantic salary. And I think you should demand to be treated fairly for that.

Speaker 3

30:19

That's my, that was supposed to be 5 minutes, but there's the 25 second version. All right, thank you very much. We are going to start with company presentations now. And thanks for coming today.

Speaker 3

30:32

Hi,

Speaker 4

30:32

I'm Jose.

Speaker 5

30:40

We're going to go alphabetically. The first company up is Armory.

Speaker 4

30:46

Hello, YC! Hello,

Speaker 6

30:58

YC! Armory is here! And we believe that software is the highest leveraged way to improve humanity. But how do you feel when you hear deploy to production?

Speaker 6

31:17

How has that gone for you? Maybe, so, rollback? Or, fire drill time? But don't worry, Armory is building a next generation deployment platform to help software teams ship better software faster.

Speaker 6

31:46

And we're looking for skilled individuals that want to grow together and learn from 1 another. And growing we have done tremendously. Last year we were at $60,000 annual revenue. Today we're at 1.3 million.

Speaker 6

32:06

There's a lot more to talk about. Find our booth. Thank you. Hi, everyone.

Speaker 6

32:11

I'm John.

Speaker 7

32:26

And at Astronis, we are building small, low-cost telecommunication satellites. Why are we doing this? Because 4000000000 people in the world are not online right now.

Speaker 7

32:40

It is a huge problem. There are so many people out in the world who do not have the access to knowledge and education and all the things that they need to improve their lives. The other side of this is this is an enormous business opportunity for the right company to tackle this problem. There's actually very few things in the world that grow exponentially 30-plus percent year on year.

Speaker 7

33:10

And the world's hunger for bandwidth is 1 of those things. There really is just few things out there you can imagine. Sam talked about growing markets. And there are very, very few places where the market grows this fast and this consistently.

Speaker 7

33:30

So why is this still a problem after all of these years and all of the many billions of dollars that have been spent in space? And the answer, I think, is captured pretty well in this picture. So this is a picture of what telecommunication satellites look like today. They are massive, double-decker bus-sized satellites that cost several hundred million dollars or half a billion dollars each.

Speaker 7

34:00

With small satellites, we can do the same job at a fraction of the cost. At Astronis, we've already put our first test satellite in space, and it's orbiting right now, working great. We launched it a few months ago. We have raised a very large funding round, Series A, from a firm called Andreessen Horowitz.

Speaker 7

34:24

So very well-funded. Going to be around for a little while, see this thing through. And we have a spectacular team of engineers. We're just over 30 people now.

Speaker 7

34:35

From Google, SpaceX, Skybox, some of the larger airspace companies, a huge array of specialties across software, mechanical, controls, you name it. Every possible type of engineering you can imagine. And really, I mean, I just can't say enough about how fortunate we are to have this team. You may have heard that SpaceX is doing a constellation of low-earth orbit satellites to try and solve this problem.

Speaker 7

35:08

And the lead antenna engineer for that constellation just left SpaceX to join Astronis. Yes. Oh, sorry, 1 other really important point. You do not actually have to have space experience or even embedded experience to join the team.

Speaker 7

35:28

We have a whole group of veteran engineers. They have put the operating system in place. This is more application-level code. So please do not let that dissuade you.

Speaker 7

35:40

Wanted to talk a little bit about the company culture. So we're very hands-on. We build lots of hardware. We build it fast.

Speaker 7

35:46

We iterate quickly. You have an opportunity to learn from all these different disciplines and engineers of all stripes, like I mentioned, if you want. We have something we're very proud of, which we call a blameless culture. These things are hard, and we know things are going to go wrong.

Speaker 7

36:02

And the other thing is we take work-life balance seriously at Astronis. And we have baby goats. It's the most random thing ever, but we'd love to do trips out to the farms, to farms outside of the Bay Area, do these retreats, and do fun things with the team. And that's Astratis.

Speaker 7

36:24

So, thank you very much. Hi everyone, my

Speaker 4

36:28

name is Chris Szymanski,

Speaker 8

36:41

and I'm the head of engineering at Atrium, a tech enabled law firm for startups. And at Atrium, we're making legal services fast and transparent, and we're building a platform that turns documents into data. So legal is broken, and we hear this from our clients all the time, with quotes like this.

Speaker 8

37:01

Atrium works to fix legal. And we do that with a fully digitized legal services platform that's powered by both real lawyers and AI. So our team of lawyers makes better decisions thanks to our AI technology. This is a massive market over 400 billion dollars per year and it's highly fragmented with the top 25 law firms only holding a 13% market share.

Speaker 8

37:28

There's also very few, in fact only 1, law firm startup who's tackling this market, and that's Atrium. We employ cutting-edge ML technologies. And every day, we work hand-in-hand with both lawyers, and you'll see here, engineers and lawyers working together. We're working to transform an extremely outdated industry and lowering barriers for entrepreneurs to get access to legal services.

Speaker 8

37:52

We'd love to have you join our team. We're hiring software engineers, and you'll get to work with Justin Kahn, our CEO, myself, head of engineering, Max Cantor, our head of data, and our 20 other engineers. We'd love to have you apply at atrium.co. Thank you so much.

Speaker 4

38:15

Thank you. I don't have

Speaker 9

38:16

slides to take. Okay. Cool.

Speaker 9

38:23

Hi. Hello. Hi. My name is Tammy Sun.

Speaker 9

38:31

I am the cofounder and CEO of Carrot Fertility. We make customized fertility benefits for modern companies. What does that mean? That means that we make it easier and more affordable for employees to access everything from personalized fertility education through text, video, voice chat with fertility experts, data-driven learning modules, and making egg freezing, IVF, and everything in between all the way to surrogacy easier and more affordable.

Speaker 9

39:02

And so our mission is fertility care for all. The first goal of our mission is to make fertility benefits and carrot in particular as standard in the modern workplace as medical, dental and vision coverage. This is a mission that has met its moment. Today even, more than 50% of millennials believe that fertility should be equal with dental and vision as coverage at work.

Speaker 9

39:27

And so these trends have helped Carrot become the leading provider of fertility benefits in the U.S. For mid-market companies and moving very quickly into the enterprise. We have thousands of members, who we call employees, across the country and we're operational in nearly 30 countries around the world. So why join us?

Speaker 9

39:47

Well, there's 3 reasons. First, it's the product. What sets our engineers apart is that each of them is a key player in every aspect of developing the product. You're not just simply releasing release after release.

Speaker 9

40:00

You're going to help decide what to build next and you're going to be responsible for making sure how we measure success after the release. The second is product market fit. So we know that companies want Carrot. And we're really lucky and proud that companies who are working with us love it.

Speaker 9

40:20

So we're really proud to be working with some of the most important public and private technology companies in the world, but we're also breaking into finance, media, real estate, and even retail. So the market opportunity is enormous, and this is a really exciting time to be at the company where you're going to be pushed and challenged to be doing way more than probably what you're qualified for. And the last is that this is a mission that matters. And if it matters to you, then this is my promise to you.

Speaker 9

40:50

You're going to have the opportunity to do some of the best work of your life on a solution whose time has come. And in exchange, Carit and me personally promise you a 50X opportunity for growth in ways that you won't be able to achieve anywhere else. So I'm here today with my product engineering team, Pat, Dan, and Arun. Please come find us afterwards to talk about fertility, what we're doing, why we're doing it, how we're doing it, what's egg freezing, and why you might be our next teammate.

Speaker 9

41:22

Thank you.

Speaker 5

41:32

Hey, guys, I'm Dave from Chardio. And our mission, we call it Join People on Data. And basically what that means for us is Excel's been around for about 30 years.