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Speaker 1

00:00

What is

Speaker 2

00:06

the best thing you learned from Paul Graham? Who

Speaker 1

00:19

is your favorite founder? But still possible and I hope to teach

Speaker 3

00:20

other people how to do it.

Speaker 2

00:21

Johnny Chin is definitely my favorite founder with a man bun and probably everybody else's favorite founder with a man bun too. It's like I need that answer to be longer than it already was. Maybe this is long enough.

Speaker 2

00:34

The social problem that I would most likely see startups tackle in 2017 is the problem of equality. I think we are moving towards a more and more unequal world and we need especially education but other social systems to change to fix that. I'm also interested in solutions like basic income. This is a tough 1.

Speaker 2

00:56

I would treat school as your day job and then with the rest of your time I would start working on projects that you're excited about. There's no reason a high school student can't start a startup. Hamlet's a very good choice. My favorite play is probably Macbeth.

Speaker 2

01:11

I think the life's but a walking shadow speech is amazing. I also really like Waiting for Godot, although truth be told I am more into books than plays. The top 3 emotions I have felt this week are anxiety, sadness, and then happiness. I'm super nervous about the Trump presidency and how it's going so far and I'm scared that it's going to get a lot worse.

Speaker 2

01:36

I've not been sleeping well at night and I've been pretty upset most of the time. That's not consistent with most weeks. Most weeks I'm pretty optimistic and pretty happy. I was happy sometimes this week when I've seen people come together to talk about how we build the future that we want and the spirit of that makes me tremendously happy.

Speaker 2

01:55

I don't actively cultivate the emotions I feel. I don't think I'm particularly good at emotion control, but That's who I am and so be it. What is the 10 year goal for Y Combinator? Well if we do really well, if we execute, if we're able to keep growing and finding the best young entrepreneurs in the world and making them successful, everything goes really well, then maybe in 10 years we can get acquired by Whale.

Speaker 2

02:24

I do, you know, I still find it faster for me to use this than to have it in a Word document. I try periodically to switch to a Word document and there's something that just works for my brain and my workflow about pen and paper. I don't think that's the way that you build a hugely successful company. I think that the most impactful, most important companies tend to have a pretty new idea, or if it's an old idea, they at least do it in a really new way.

Speaker 2

02:56

I've tried a bunch of the nootropics and I didn't think they worked or I had headaches. Modafinil definitely does work, but it has side effects I didn't like. I do have 1 tip though. I'm a vegetarian and I found that taking omega-3 and B12 has significantly boosted my performance.

Speaker 2

03:16

We're giving them money and we're going to provide resources to help them however they'd like. Obviously, they run the ACLU. I don't think we can give them too much advice there, but if they have specific things they need help with, we will try to help them just like we do for any other non-profit or for-profit we fund for that matter. The 1 that I would start with is called Neural Networks and Deep Learning.

Speaker 2

03:39

It's by Michael Nielsen. It's available for free online and I think it's a wonderful introduction. There are a lot of other books beyond that that you can find, but that's a going to start with. Our MOOC is going to start in early April.

Speaker 2

03:54

It'll run through early June. It's going to be awesome. I'm going to teach it and we are going to try to replicate some of the Y Combinator experience and community for people taking the MOOC. I hope you'll check it out.

Speaker 2

04:05

I hope you like it. The question I find myself struggling with the most is what will happen to the economy and to jobs as automation becomes more and more of a powerful force. I don't think I have a great answer here yet. I have a lot of ideas but I think it's a really hard problem and critically important.

Speaker 2

04:31

The 2 best things I've learned about enterprise sales or sales of any sort is 1, personal relationships are super important and 2, you have to be very persistent and I think if you keep those 2 things in mind you can do pretty well and keep the sales cycle length as short as possible. I think this is a really great idea. YC is not set up for this. I think you need a very different financial instrument, a different way to make returns, but I think someone else should do this.

Speaker 2

05:01

In fact, I've been encouraging a friend of mine to start this and if she doesn't, I hope someone else will, I think it would have a really big impact on the economy. Stripe has a product called Stripe Atlas. It makes it really easy to set up a US company, get a US bank account, everything else you need to do business. And we recommend that to companies that want to form a US entity that don't live here.

Speaker 2

05:28

I think the most number of times someone has been rejected before getting into YC is 6. That's the most I know of. There could have been 1 with more. And many of our most successful startups have been rejected.

Speaker 2

05:39

Some, like Dropbox, was rejected once with the previous idea. There are far worse things that will happen to you as a startup than getting rejected by YC. So if that's a problem for you, you probably shouldn't be doing a startup anyway. But we love it when people reapply.

Speaker 2

05:58

My favorite Paul Graham essay is definitely how to start a startup. That changed my life. I think it's changed thousands or tens of thousands of other people's lives and I think it's an answer to what to do with your career that really appeals to some people. I believe in the 10,000 hours model for a lot of things and certainly I think for learning how to become a great engineer it takes at least 10,000 hours.

Speaker 2

06:23

And so I think the way to become a great engineer is just to start building a lot of stuff and work with really smart people and don't expect it to happen overnight. I haven't been able to in the last week, but I want to talk to him and my plan is to explain why I think specific policies are bad. I think that it's important that we keep talking to people that are in power and hold different views. I think the left, we've done a very good job of convincing all of ourselves that we're on a path that we're nervous about and think is really bad, but we need to convince people on the other side.

Speaker 2

06:58

And I think talking to them is the best way I can think of to do that. Although I'm also happy to see things like the protests that happened this weekend seem to get noticed.

Speaker 1

07:15

You