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Mark Pincus Built Five Companies to Learn This One Thing
"You can't just focus on any one piece of this. If you want to build great products, you can't avoid management. You can't avoid having a board or investors. You just gotta dive into the whole enchilada." — @markpinc with @garrytan
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Brian Chesky: Don't listen to venture capitalists
"I've had a court side seat at all of the Warriors championship games.
But just because I had a front row seat at championships, doesn't mean that I could coach an NBA team.
And that's true of venture capitalists."
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Citadel Founder Ken Griffin: Don’t Be the Smartest in the Room
"If you go work in a firm and you're the smartest person in the room, you have so screwed up your Stanford MBA.
I will walk into a room at Citadel. On any given topic, I guarantee you I am not the smartest guy in the room.
You don't want to be the smartest person in the room.
People that you will learn from: you will learn from your colleagues at work, you will learn from your customers, and you will learn from your competitors."
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Sergey Brin: "AI Pulled Me Out of Retirement"
"This is the most fun I've had in my life honestly and ... this is the greatest transformative moment in computer science ever.
Being a computer scientist, it is the most exciting thing of my life technologically."
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David Friedberg: The Three Most Important Consequences of Tariffs
"If you use tariffs, or other taxes or other government intervening systems, to distort the natural forces of markets ... then you're creating a disincentive for American enterprise to be more competitive."
@friedberg on @theallinpod
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Sam Altman on the importance of agency
"You can just do stuff.
No one has all the answers. There are no adults in the room that will magically tell you what to do.
That was a big unlock in my life."
@sama talking with @ycombinator CEO @garrytan
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Trump praises Elon Musk on Joe Rogan
“Think of what Elon does ... he is from a different planet. He's the greatest guy.”
- @realDonaldTrump on @elonmusk
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Sam Altman: There's Never Been a Better Time to Start a Company
"If I were 22 right now and graduating college, I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history. There's never been a more amazing time to go create something totally new."
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YC's Diana Hu: 'Good Enough' vs. Top 1% Software of Engineers
"There's going to be a generation of software engineers that are good enough because it's so easy to retool there with code gen tools. The barrier to enter is so low.
But to be exceptional, like the top 1%, you're going to need to get into deliberate practice."
@sdianahu on @ycombinator's @LightconePod
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Brian Chesky on going ‘Founder Mode’ during the pandemic
Chesky describes the recent shift in his management style: “I totally changed how I ran the company. I used to be very hands off. I democratized data. I was very much reactive and I thought my job was strategy and capital allocation.
But here’s the weird thing: the less hands on I was, the more I got sucked into problems. By the time I got sucked into a problem, it was 10x the amount of work.
Then I decided to do something different. We’re going to be totally integrated. One roadmap. I am going to be involved in every single detail. Airbnb is not going to do anything more than I can personally focus on. This is what Steve did at Apple.”
- @bchesky with @Jason on @twistartups
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David Friedberg: Why Google Is Still a Money-Making Machine
"There's a lot of resiliency in Google that I don't think people have given the company credit for.
What earnings show is that there's significant growth. $9 billion in YouTube, $7.5 billion in non-Google ads, $10 billion in subscriptions with 270 million subscribers across subscription businesses, $12 billion in cloud revenue, which is growing 30% year over year.
There's a lot of resiliency even if you take out search."
@friedberg on @theallinpod with @andrewrsorkin, @chamath, and @DavidSacks
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Brian Chesky’s advice to his younger self
“Try more things, have more experiences, and don’t seek status ... You should do things that you’re good at, but you tend to be good at things you’re interested in. You should only seek out whatever you’re genuinely curious about.”
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Sam Altman: Here Is The True Definition of "Risk"
"Most people are too risk averse. Most advice is biased too much towards conservative paths.
What risk actually looks like is that you look back at the end of your career and you're like 'I wasted it.'" -@sama
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Box CEO Aaron Levie on why AI agents are a $1 trillion opportunity
"AI will not just be serving back an answer for you, it will also go and do something for you ... as tokens come down in cost, we can scale up intellectual labor and knowledge work [with AI] orders of magnitude more than we could have with people."
- @levie with @TurnerNovak on @ThePeelPod
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George Mack on the Importance of Being High Agency
"If you wait for the news, you'll be wrong or late."
@george__mack with @ShaanVP & @thesamparr on @myfirstmilpod
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Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas on expanding your luck surface area
"Life is about luck surface area. I've had these friends that talk the exact same way: 'that guy got lucky' ... get to the right attitude and don't blame it on luck. Give yourself more shots at success."
-@perplexity_ai's @AravSrinivas with @sriramk and @aarthir
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Elon Musk: DOGE Is Nothing Compared To The 'Tsunami of AI'
"Fixing the government is kind of like the beach is dirty and there's some needles and feces and trash and you want to clean up the beach.
But then there's also this thousand foot wall of water, which is the tsunami of AI.
How much does cleaning the beach really matter if you've got a thousand foot AI tsunami about to hit?"
@elonmusk with @garrytan at @ycombinator's Startup School
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Why Brian Chesky doesn’t believe in 1-on-1 meetings
“I don't believe in 1-on-1s and almost no great CEO in history has ever done 1-on-1s. Very few.
Jensen Huang doesn’t do 1-on-1s because he wants everyone to be part of a solution.”
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YC CEO Garry Tan in Congress: A Call for Fair Tech Competition
"I'm here today representing Little Tech. The startups, innovators, and entrepreneurs whose voices are rarely heard in Washington, but who hold the key to America's technological future." - @ycombinator's @garrytan
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YC Co-Founder Jessica Livingston on Meeting Sam Altman as a Teenager
"Sam Altman was impressive at age 19 ... he'd arrange to meet with a carrier company CEO in the middle of America and he was too young to even rent a car."
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Sam Altman: Big Tech Companies Don't Understand AI
"It is astonishing to me. That's why I'm so excited for startups right now.
The world is still sleeping on AI to such an astonishing degree ... and it's great."
@sama talking with @ycombinator's @garrytan
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NEW: Peter Thiel on Trump's Tariff Policy
"We need a very drastic reset with China ... about a quarter of the US trade deficit is bilaterally with China and another quarter is indirectly with China.
There are ways that the economic relationship with China is fairly efficient ... we don't really want a lot of these jobs in Wisconsin. But it's this geopolitical rivalry that's in the background that you have to factor in. The economists never factor it in properly with China."
@peterthiel with @JTLonsdale on @AmOptimistShow
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Sequoia's Alfred Lin: Why 1% Compounding Beats a 10x Idea
"I hear founders talk all the time about how they only want 10X ideas because those are the things that move the needle.
And it turns out that just simply compounding 1% every single day moves the needle even more."
@Alfred_Lin talking with @shaneparrish on @farnamstreet's The Knowledge Project
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How Boom Supersonic's @bscholl recruited a world class team
"If you can wave a magic wand and get anybody on the planet to come work with you on this, who would your top five people be?
Forget whether they're available.
Forget whether they're interested.
And it turns out, you don't need too many levels of recursion before I was actually talking to the best people on the planet."
Source: @ycombinator @snowmaker
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Peter Thiel's Advice for the Young & Ambitious
"For the last 25-30 years, tech - meaning computer science, software, internet, mobile internet, and now crypto & AI - has been the vector of progress in our society. This is where you can do new things. This is where you can build new companies.
Almost everything else is stale, sclerotic, and extremely malthusian in practice.
So I would tell people to go into tech."
@peterthiel talking with @JTLonsdale on @AmOptimistShow
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Marc Andreessen on the importance of startup timing:
"You always feel like you're too late when in fact a lot of founders fail because they were too early.
It's how I felt with Netscape. I thought we were too late. In retrospect, we weren't."
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David Sacks: Is OpenAI's Jony Ive Overrated?
"Is Jony Ive just a media creation?
Maybe he's parlayed this incredible reputation that he's built in the media into 2% of OpenAI. It's incredible.
What a trade."
@DavidSacks on @theallinpod
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White House AI Czar David Sacks: Google Must Go All-In on Gemini or Lose to ChatGPT
"It is a true innovator's dilemma ... what's basically happening right now is users are learning a new habit.
They're learning to go to ChatGPT to get their questions answered or their searches answered in a completely different way."
@DavidSacks on @theallinpod
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Anthropic Co-Founder Tom Brown: Why Anthropic Models Are The Best at Coding
"The benchmarks are so easy to game. All the other big AI labs have teams whose job it is to make the benchmark scores good.
We don't have such a team. That is the biggest factor."
@AnthropicAI's @nottombrown on @ycombinator's @LightconePod with @garrytan, @harjtaggar, @sdianahu, and @snowmaker
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Brian Chesky’s advice to his younger self
“Try more things, have more experiences, and don’t seek status.
You should do things that you’re good at, but you tend to be good at things you’re interested in. You should only seek out whatever you’re genuinely curious about.”
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Flexport Founder Ryan Petersen recounts telling Paul Graham that he was stepping down as Flexport CEO
"I said 'I think he's going to be better for the company than I am.' And PG said 'that's like saying some other guy is going to be a better husband for your wife.'
No one has ever been more disappointed in me than when I told PG that I was hiring a CEO."
@typesfast talking about his conversation with @paulg about stepping down as Flexport CEO, before eventually returning to the company a few month later
Source: @KPGrit
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Brian Chesky’s advice to his younger self
“Try more things, have more experiences, and don’t seek status.
You should do things that you’re good at, but you tend to be good at things you’re interested in. You should only seek out whatever you’re genuinely curious about.”
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Sam Altman’s advice to founders
“Bet on the AI trend. We are not near the saturation point. The models will get so much better so quickly.
Your advantage with speed, focus, conviction, and the ability to react to how fast the technology is moving, that is the #1 edge of a startup.”
Source: @ycombinator, @garrytan, @sama
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NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on resilience
"I like hard things because ... they take a long time. If it takes a long time, people who are less committed won't do it. Only a resilient and dedicated person will"
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Sam Altman on the difficult early days of OpenAI
In conversation with @stripe cofounder @collision, @sama reflects: "Nobody is honest about how bad the early days of a startup are because it's so embarrassing in retrospect."
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Sam Altman’s secret to startup execution:
Always keep momentum
“You want a company to be winning all the time. If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control and snowball downwards. A winning team feels good and keeps winning.”
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Sundar Pichai Reveals That Google Founder Sergey Brin Is Coding Gemini
"Sergey is definitely spending time with the Gemini team in a pretty hardcore way, like sitting and coding and spending time with the engineers.
That gives energy to the team. It is unparalleled to have a founder sitting there, looking at loss curves, giving feedback on model architectures, and how can we improve post training."
@sundarpichai talking with @friedberg on @theallinpod
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Sam Altman to Bill Gates: I didn’t expect ChatGPT to get so good
"In our case, we had someone that was the guy that build GPT-1, who did it off by himself and had no deep understanding of how it worked or why it worked.
And then we got these scaling laws. We started to be able to predict how much better it was going to be."
@sama in conversation with @BillGates
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Brian Chesky: Why Founders Make Better Leaders
"Founders get their hands dirty. If you're in the bathroom, there's a paper towel, a founder will pick it up and put it in the trash. A manager will be like, why is there a paper towel there?"
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Marc Andreessen: the thing startup founders misunderstand about 'risk'
"I've always been a fan of what @arachleff taught me, which is called The Onion Theory of Risk.
You can think about the startup on Day 1 as having every conceivable kind of risk: founder risk, product risk, technical risk, revenue risk, etc.
A startup at the beginning is this long list of risks. Being a founder is a process of peeling away layers of risk as you go."
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Windsurf Founder: AI Will 10x Every Part of Coding - Faster Than You Think
"It's gonna get crazy."
"Every part of the software development life cycle, whether it be writing code, reviewing code, testing code, debugging code, designing code, AI is gonna be adding 10X the amount of leverage very shortly.
It's gonna happen much more quickly than people imagine."
@_mohansolo on @ycombinator's @LightconePod
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Sam Altman: We Want ChatGPT to Remember Your Entire Life
"The ideal state is a very tiny reasoning model with a trillion tokens of context that you put your whole life into.
The model never retrains. The weights never customized, but it can reason across your whole life context and do it efficiently.
Every conversation you've ever had in your life, every book you've ever read, every email you've ever read, and everything you've ever looked at is in there. Plus it is connected to all your data from other sources."
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Sam Altman on the future of AI agents
“An agent is something that I can give a long duration task to and provide minimal supervision.
The agent that I'm excited about is something that is more like a smart senior coworker that can go do a two week task really well.”
@sama on @twentyminutevc with @HarryStebbings
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Bill Gates reflects on competing against Steve Jobs
"His taste in design and user interface and his intuition about people was genius in a way you can't explain.
But he didn't look at code or write code ... what he was super good at, I was not good at. I envied those talents that he had.
I don't know somebody who I say, 'oh yeah, he's just like Steve Jobs.'"
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How Sam Altman got into the first Y Combinator batch
When Sam was a Stanford freshman, Paul Graham rejected him from YC, saying “you’re a freshman and you should wait.”
Sam replied: “I’m a sophomore and I’m coming.”
Reflecting on the story, Sam says: “I don’t often see why things have to be the way they are so I’m going to do this thing from first principles … I do think you can just do stuff and try stuff a surprising amount of the time.”
Credit: @ycombinator, @garrytan, @sama
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Brian Chesky: How to Sell & Recruit
“If you try too hard to sell, they’re naturally skeptical and they’ll take the counter-position.
Have you ever been on a date with someone and they’re trying to pursue you too much and it turns you off? You have to be careful."
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Doordash Founder Tony Xu's Advice to Entrepreneurs
Just Do The Work
"One of the things I would tell my 18-year-old self is that - especially when you're on the cusp of something new, take AI - there's no better way to be the expert than just to do the work.
You might be surprised at how quickly you become the expert."
@DoorDash's @t_xu with @ycombinator's @garrytan
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Brian Chesky explains 'founder mode' hiring
"Steve Jobs said: 'start with the results and work backwards to the people.'
Most people start with the resumes. They start with the brands.
But you should actually ask yourself: what products do I admire? And then find who built those products.”
- @bchesky in conversation with @rabois
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Sam Altman: think deeply about what to focus on
"You should have a very high bar for doing anything but thinking about what to work on."
@sama in convo with @david_perell
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Billionaire Investor: The Known and Unknown Winners of AI
"The clear winners in this AI revolution are going to be the major technology companies. That's sort of easy ... and they have enormous amounts of data.
The winners that are unknown today are the companies that are going to figure out how to apply artificial intelligence into their existing businesses and make them better."
@Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt with @farnamstreet's @shaneparrish
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Sam Altman’s Secret to Amplifying Your Ideas with ChatGPT
"A big part of the value of writing is to clarify your own thinking.
And we have new tools that help you do that better than ever before."
@sama talking with @david_perell
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Sam Altman on the power of agency & conviction
“Before YC, I had this deep belief that somewhere in the world there were adults in charge and they knew what was going on.
I now understand that you can just do stuff. No one has all the answers. There are no adults in the room that will magically tell you what to do. That was a big unlock in life.”
Source: @ycombinator @garrytan @sama
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Patrick Collison: API Design Shapes Your Business Strategy
"If I was to do everything at Stripe again, the thing we could have done differently would be to have spent even more time on APIs and data models."
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Sam Altman on the Importance of Focus
"The days are long, but the decades are short.
It's so easy to get caught up in things that are urgent but unimportant, or get caught up in playing status and power games that don't matter.
You do need to focus and do stuff. But, you know, I think it's really good to focus for some period of time and then step back and think 'am I really doing the right thing?'" -@sama
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Do You Still Need to Learn to Code?
YC Partner Jared Friedman's take: "You should still learn how to code because learning how to code will literally make you smarter."
"Sam Altman had a recent comment that went viral. The idea that in the future unicorns can have 10 employees or fewer."
@snowmaker on @ycombinator's @LightconePod
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The Airbnb Pitch that Stunned Sam Altman
"Those were founders that were so passionate about this idea, and they believed so strongly in what they were going to make it work.
And it was only a few small evolutions past that where things really started to work."
@sama discussing meeting @bchesky, @jgebbia, and @nathanblec for the first time
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David Friedberg’s simple startup advice:
"How do you succeed? You gotta grind.
There wasn’t some moment of genius with the Wright Brothers building the first airplane. There wasn’t some discovery or whatever mythology.
It was a grind and they eventually solved it.” -@friedberg
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How a 17-year-old created the fastest growing unicorn in India
Zepto founder @aadit_palicha talks with @ycombinator CEO @garrytan about getting into YC at 17, meeting with YC Partner Jared Friedman (@snowmaker) for the first time, and creating the first version of Zepto in a WhatsApp group.
"It just started off as a WhatsApp group where we were delivering groceries for our neighbors because it was a nightmare to get groceries in the first wave of the pandemic."
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Box Founder Aaron Levie: Build for Customers Living in the Future
"@paulg has a great article about living in the future and and building for what is missing when you're living in the future.
If you find customers that are working in the future, you will be able to work with them to find what is missing in the future and how to build technology to support all these new use cases that will emerge."
@Box's @levie
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Uber Founder Travis Kalanick: Being Early Is Worse Than Being Wrong
"It will grind you to dust if you're too early.
The company I did before Uber, I was probably wrong and too early, which is really the worst.
At some point I had socks that said 'blood, sweat, and ramen.'"
@travisk in conversation with @PeterDiamandis
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Is OpenAI going to outcompete AI startups?
"I feel like Sam Altman has talked about this a bunch. It's not enough to drop AI in your business. You have to actually build a business.
I don't think OpenAI is necessarily out to get all the startups. I actually think that on the API side, they very much hope that a lot of them do really, really well."
@garrytan on @ycombinator's @LightconePod
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Angel Investor Elad Gil on the 3 types of founders that become extremely successful
"The first one is the polymathic, hyper-intellectual yet very competitive type of person. That's probably Patrick and John from Stripe. That was Larry and Sergey when I worked at Google.
The second one is the super hardcore, extremely focused, really driven overdrive founder. That's Travis from Uber. They say no to everything. They're just all in on one thing in a really good way.
And there's a third type of founder, which is like the network effect business. If you have something that has strong network effects, you're going to do well. And then you could be Zuck and then take it to the next level."
@eladgil talking with @JTLonsdale on @AmOptimistShow
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YC's Jared Friedman on the future of vertical AI agents
"The world has not caught on to just how big it’s going to get ... I think there are going to be 300 billion dollar plus companies started just in this one category.”
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How Windsurf Created an AI Coding Model and Got Acquired by OpenAI for $3B
"So first of all, we ran the model ourselves.
The reason why we were able to run it and provide it for free is we actually had our own inference run time at the time.
And that obviously came from the fact that we were originally a GPU virtualization company to start with. That enabled us to ship the v0 with an open source product quite quickly."
@_mohansolo on @ycombinator's @LightconePod with @garrytan, @sdianahu, @harjtaggar, and @snowmaker
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Brian Chesky on the loneliness of success
"I thought I was going to give everything to the company. It was this selfless act, but it became so selfless that I started to lose a sense of myself."
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Sam Altman's Advice to Young People: Surround Yourself With The Ambitious
"Surround yourself with people who will make you more ambitious, make you more inquisitive, and shift your perspective.
98% of people in the world will try to pull you back and say, 'it seems a little bit too crazy, a little bit too out there, a little bit too ambitious.'
Almost everyone wants you to be average because it fits their framework."-@sama
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Airbnb Founder Brian Chesky on Founder Mode: When You Stop Listening to Your Inner Voice, You Become a Manager Rather Than a Founder
"You start listening to everyone but your inner voice. And that's when you become a manager, not a founder." — @bchesky
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Sam Altman: Stop the Deferred Life Plan & Build Rockets Now
"I don't believe in the deferred life plan.
A common criticism of people in Silicon Valley - who have great futures in their past - is that they say some version of the following sentence:
'My life's work is to build rockets, so I'm going to make a hundred million dollars trading cryptocurrency with my crypto hedge fund because I don't want to think about the money problem anymore, and then I'm going to build rockets.'
And they never do either."
-@sama
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MrBeast's Operating Philosophy: Nothing is Impossible
"If you want to innovate and do things that have never been done before and push boundaries, you have to have a mindset among your people that nothing is impossible.
If I was like, 'I want the Taj Mahal for a week.' There are people at my company that would smile. They'd see that as a challenge and they'd go to war to figure it out."
@MrBeast on @myfirstmilpod with @ShaanVP
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Why 2025 Will Be the Year of AI Agents
@DavidSacks and @levie discuss how Manus and other tools are fundamentally changing the nature of knowledge work
"What's cool about the demo is the way that it seamlessly toggles between those four apps, and you can see what the AI agent is doing.
It's browsing the Internet.
It's searching for things.
It's writing documents.
It's crossing things off its to do list.
It's pretty easy to imagine where this goes, which is you'll be able to connect an agent to all of your SaaS apps."
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Replit's Amjad Masad on the future of building with AI agents
@amasad: "My favorite thing is this order of magnitude time difference of building something.
Someone said they spent eighteen months building a start-up. They were able to generate the same app in ten minutes with Replit Agent."
@garrytan: "What a time to be alive."
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Brian Chesky on why ‘founder mode’ is the best way to run a company
"If you go through history, many of the best leaders - from Steve Jobs to Walt Disney to Jensen, Elon, and many others today - they are people that are in the details.
A lot of people hear this and say ‘isn’t that micromanaging?’ There’s a difference. You can be in the details with people without telling them what to do.”
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Garry Tan calls out Google's Self-Preferencing Policies👀
"We're not asking for privileged access. We want equal access.
We want a fair market and a seat at the table to provide choice to consumers."
@ycombinator's @garrytan testifying in the Senate
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YC's Jared Friedman: Why AI Lets Founders Ignore Outdated Startup Advice
"In this new AI era, the right mental model is to just use interesting technology, follow your own curiosity, figure out what's possible.
If you're doing that and you're living at the edge of the future like @paulg said and you're exploring the latest technology, there's so many great start-up ideas."
@snowmaker on @ycombinator's @LightconePod
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YC Partners: Why Now Is the Best Time to Build with AI
"Stay up to date with the latest tools.
They might not be perfect for your industry yet, but I'm betting a lot of money that they will cross a tipping point and they will be extremely useful.
And if you are one of these people who is at the cutting edge of these tools, you have an advantage for several years, which will persist and enable you to earn a lot of money and to grow a great career."
@t_blom and @dflieb on @ycombinator's YouTube channel
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Marc Andreessen: AI will reinvent every product category
"Are people in the future going to edit videos? Or will you talk to a computer and AI does the editing?
There are huge industries where people assume things work a certain way, so it's going to be prime time for startups."
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How Sequoia's Alfred Lin Approaches Decision-Making
"The one that I learned from Amazon is whether this is a Type 1 or a Type 2 decision.
And if it's a Type 1 decision, I've learned from Brian Chesky to run out the clock because you can't go back.
And if it's a Type 2 decision, you just move forward, make a call, and course correct along the way."
Source: @Alfred_Lin on @farnamstreet's The Knowledge Project with @shaneparrish
3
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169
18,310
Brian Chesky: Win With 100 Superfans, Not 1 Million Users
"If you get a hundred people that love you, those people, if they feel incredibly passionate, will tell a hundred people.
In fact, all movements typically start - or companies or ideas that are really powerful - with just 100 people."
-@bchesky
1
18
160
20,487
Brian Armstrong: "Someone's Going To Do It—Why Not Me?"
Coinbase Founder Brian Armstrong reflects on the early days of starting the company and overcoming self-doubt
"You just notice there's some big issue in the world or some schlep you have to go through.
Sometimes you're like, man, that was such a pain. Someone's gonna have to do this. And then weeks go by and you're like 'maybe I should do it.'
I just solved it for myself. Maybe others need the same thing solved."
@coinbase's @brian_armstrong talking with @garrytan
1
17
161
21,090
Box CEO Aaron Levie on the value of building AI "wrappers"
"In the early days of cloud, if you were building software that let you manage documents and data, you would have been like 'that's a wrapper on Amazon.'
But it was a total misunderstanding of the entire scale of software that you have to build to make the storage bucket be useful in a particular application."
@levie on @ycombinator's @LightconePod
8
16
165
25,357
How Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl convinced Richard Branson to do a $2B LOI during YC
"The most surprising thing that I never would have predicted was that an airline would give us money before we ever flew an airplane.
When we were going through YC, we did a preorder deal with Virgin that we unveiled on Demo Day. A $2B LOI from Virgin."
@bscholl talking with @loganbartlett on @loganbartshow
3
14
159
23,678
Y Combinator Co-Founder Jessica Livingston shares lessons from the most successful startup founders
“They all wanted to build something that hadn’t existed. Special people do that. Other people get jobs that pay well and have some prestige and medical benefits, but these people didn’t because they were fundamentally different.”
- @jesslivingston talking about the early days of @ycombinator on @LightconePod
9
25
159
30,263
Gmail Creator Paul Buchheit: We're On The Path Towards AGI
"The key point that happened is that we crossed a line where AI went from a research project, where you put in a lot of money and don't get much out, to a thing where you put in money and get out more.
It's like when a reaction goes critical ... that's where we are right now: people can't seem to throw money at it fast enough."
@paultoo on @ycombinator's @LightconePod
17
34
159
73,426
Startup advice from Coinbase's Brian Armstrong
“You’re at the base of a mountain that’s shrouded in fog. You’re looking up and thinking ‘how do I get up?’ You can only see 3 or 4 steps ahead because of the fog. You have to just take steps into the unknown ... most people don't."
4
22
148
20,196
Sundar Pichai: AI’s Second Phase Will Let Everyone Build Apps
"When I came to go Google, the revolution was the fact that the web became dynamic. You had things like Google Maps, Flickr, Gmail. All that suddenly these came into existence.
But I think AI is going to turbocharge that in a way we haven't seen before." - @sundarpichai
7
17
160
12,308
YC CEO Garry Tan on Zero-to-One vs. Scaling
"When you're going zero-to-one, speed is the only thing that matters.
Getting zero-to-one quickly and being able to scale to a billion users are two totally different skill sets."
@ycombinator's @garrytan on @LightconePod
4
19
162
24,927
Zepto CEO Aadit Palicha's Advice to Founders:
Focus on the Love of Building
"When I started, I was still a little bit extrinsically motivated. I didn't internalize that I'm doing this purely for the love of building.
There's far easier ways to make a buck than build this crazy contraption.
I'm building so I have the opportunity to wake up in the morning and build again."
@ycombinator's @garrytan talking with @ZeptoNow's @aadit_palicha
12
20
153
64,664
Sam Altman on Ignoring Elon Musk’s “0% Chance of Success” Email
"A few years into OpenAI, Elon sent us this really mean email.
We've been working on it for a while and he said we had a 0% chance of success. That we were totally failing.
We had showed him GPT-1 recently. He was like, 'this is crap. It's not gonna work. It doesn't make sense.'
He was really a hero of mine at the time."
11
21
149
34,324
Box CEO Aaron Levie: The Cost of Intelligence Will Go to Zero
"We now have an API into intelligence. The cost of that intelligence will go down to the cost of the bare metal. Whatever the underlying cost of the GPU is, that's what you're going to pay with a little bit of margin.
Then it's all about if you can build software that takes this complicated technology and delivers it to customers to solve real world problems."
@levie discussing the future of AI on @ycombinator's @LightconePod
4
20
147
16,851
Citadel Founder Ken Griffin: How AI Will Radically Change Society
"The really interesting generative AI stories are going to be when people think about how to use these tools in radically different ways than we currently use software.
And those will be many of the game changing businesses of the next ten to twenty years.
So it's going to be incredibly exciting."
3
17
146
8,190
Box Founder Aaron Levie: Why AI Will Create Jobs (Not Destroy Them)
"Your software can now bring the underlying workflow to the customer or the underlying outcome to customer.
I don't like the word 'replace' [with AI] because most of the upside is going to be for companies that now deploy labor at things that they wouldn't have deployed labor at before."
@levie & @typesfast on @theallinpod
2
18
146
168,143
The Insane Rate of Progress of AI Models
"We've had this boiling of the frog effect. From our perspective, every three months things have just kept getting progressively better.
And now we're at this point where we're talking about full on vertical AI agents that are going to replace entire teams and functions and enterprises."
@ycombinator's @harjtaggar on @LightconePod
6
27
139
49,693
Brian Armstrong: Set Billion Dollar Goals
"You can accomplish more in 10 years than you think and less in 1 year than you think.
So try crazier stuff.
Even if it doesn't work, hopefully you'll advance the state of affairs. Something interesting will happen."
@brian_armstrong with @Lex_Clips
2
14
135
7,696
YC CEO Garry Tan on How Great Founders Sell
"The founders that I've been lucky to run across over the last couple of years can sit down with people who have a particular need and they're yanking the requirements right out of the customers.
That yanking eventually turns into customers pushing, and that's product-market fit.
A lot of people think of founders as forceful, but this is actually the opposite of forceful."
@garrytan talking with @jaltma
17
135
18,455
Zepto's 'Do Things That Don't Scale' Insight with Founder Aadit Palicha
"I was basically the shopkeeper for a couple of days. KV was delivering. In person, we could see that at the customer's doorstep, there was a lot more delight.
That rigor of testing whether we had PMF came from the grinding we had to do at YC.
YC was probably the most intense period where we learned all of these frameworks very quickly."
@ycombinator's @garrytan talking with @ZeptoNow's @aadit_palicha
3
12
135
96,307
Brian Chesky on what it takes to be a founder
"The world doesn't just change. It doesn't just transform to our dreams, ideals, and ambitions.
It requires certain type of people - we might call them entrepreneurs, inventors, all sorts of people in different domains - that believe that the world can be different than the one that they live in."
2
8
130
23,056
How Y Combinator Uses AI to Help Founders Pick Investors
"Another thing we've been using LLMs for internally is helping founders figure out who to take money from.
Sometimes you need a very straightforward rubric from 0 - 100. 0 being 'never take their money' and 100 being 'take their money right away!'"
@garrytan on @ycombinator's @LightconePod
10
19
131
98,011
YC CEO Garry Tan Testifying in Congress:
Why Access is Important for Startups to Compete Against Big Tech
"What we're hoping for is new free markets where new entrants can come in and there is not self-preferencing."
@garrytan talking about startups and competition with @SenMikeLee
3
20
133
20,106
YC CEO Garry Tan on Brian Chesky going 'Founder Mode'
"If you really examine what Brian has been talking about lately, it's that the leader has to be relatively unapologetic about who they are and what they stand for.
In order to have a strong culture, they have to actually not pull their punches."
- @ycombinator's @garrytan on @IO__podcast with @thogge and @sterlingmsnow
2
9
130
142,666
Garry Tan on Finding The Right Co-Founder:
Game Recognize Game
"When someone is truly recognizably good as an engineer or as a designer or as a product person or as a CEO or salesperson, it gets easier to find a co-founder because other people will be like, 'that's the best person I've ever worked with.'"
Source: @garrytan on @ycombinator's @LightconePod
4
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25,059
