Uncapped with Jack Altman
· Garry Tan, Harj Taggar, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S3: One thing we’ve been talking about is what the agents want. What the coding agents tell you to do turns out to be itself a really big moat. GEO, making your API docs actually written to prompt inject Claude Code to force it to use you… I’m just joking, it’s not clear that you can do that. But if you could you would because it’s that powerful. People will just say “I need X” and then “what’s the best thing on the internet to do that?” I just think that’s really powerful. [00:00:00] S2: The other thing you might say, going back to this SaaS thing, is even within SaaS you might say things that feel like they are essentially databases or systems of record — things like Rippling — feel like they’re going to be in a good spot. Then things where the moat was around the number of integrations built, or data connectors, or that kind of stuff — which you can now just code up in 10 or 30 minutes — that’s brittle. [00:00:00] S0: Do you think it’s system-of-record that makes payroll sticky, or do you think it’s touching money? [00:00:00] S3: Touching money. Regulatory. You have systems that are working, you don’t want to touch that unless you have a really good reason. [00:00:00] S0: Because one of the ones that comes up a lot right now is, are CRMs safe? I don’t have a particularly strong opinion, but it seems like an interesting question. It doesn’t exactly touch money, doesn’t exactly touch regulatory . It includes a lot of important information, but that information can now live in email or somewhere else.
· Jack Altman, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan
[00:00:00] S0: Because one of the ones that comes up a lot right now is, are CRMs safe? I don’t have a particularly strong opinion, but it seems like an interesting question. It doesn’t exactly touch money, doesn’t exactly touch regulatory . It includes a lot of important information, but that information can now live in email or somewhere else. [00:00:00] S2: I think Salesforce is probably screwed. There have been so many attempts to do the Stripe strategy. Get startups in a YC batch using your CRM, because everyone hates Salesforce. But no one could ever really grow into a big company because at some point your head of sales says, “No, I need these reports,” [00:00:00] S0: And to your point, you need all those integrations, badly. [00:00:00] S2: Exactly. Now that’s all just going away. I suspect the next Salesforce is going to come out of a YC batch that sells to all the other YC startups. Investors will say, “Oh, it’s not going to grow because no one can compete with Salesforce.” [00:00:00] S0: Also, “all its customers are YC companies. It’ll never work.” What about hardware? Is hard tech safe? [00:00:00] S3: Hard tech is just hard. The moat comes from it being hard to source, hard to make it work. It’s just another muscle. [00:00:00] S0: It’s atoms. AI hasn’t exactly come for atoms yet. [00:00:00] S3: Robotics is still a little ways off, but we need ASI. I think we have AGI now, and ASI is coming. Superintelligence is clearly just around the corner.
· Garry Tan, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S3: Robotics is still a little ways off, but we need ASI. I think we have AGI now, and ASI is coming. Superintelligence is clearly just around the corner. [00:00:00] S0: Do you think when we know we’ll know? Or do you think there’ll be a thing to you that would say that a new moment is here? [00:00:00] S3: I think we have limited versions of ASI right now. I saw a demo— [00:00:00] S0: All the bots talking together? That was crazy. [00:00:00] S3: Yeah, that was crazy. That’s the first real example of swarm intelligence. In AI research, swarm intelligence is like this huge field. This was a massive validation of that field. It’s kind of an interesting question. All the main AI labs talk are like, “We’re just going to build the God model, just make it mega-big.” Think about Dr. Manhattan or something. Biological systems and human society are not modeled that way. We have lots of people with lots of diverse hardware, and different opinions about all kinds of things. You come together and see what sticks. That’s what research is, for instance. Swarm intelligence versus god-level intelligence is a very interesting thing and that’s just the beginning of that. That just happened literally last week.
· Garry Tan, Jack Altman, Harj Taggar
[00:00:00] S3: Yeah, that was crazy. That’s the first real example of swarm intelligence. In AI research, swarm intelligence is like this huge field. This was a massive validation of that field. It’s kind of an interesting question. All the main AI labs talk are like, “We’re just going to build the God model, just make it mega-big.” Think about Dr. Manhattan or something. Biological systems and human society are not modeled that way. We have lots of people with lots of diverse hardware, and different opinions about all kinds of things. You come together and see what sticks. That’s what research is, for instance. Swarm intelligence versus god-level intelligence is a very interesting thing and that’s just the beginning of that. That just happened literally last week. [00:00:00] S0: Is there a type of project or pathway for a startup to build that you’re not currently funding that you’d like to? I’m thinking of hardware companies or projects that at the beginning I don’t think can start with $1 million. Some of these genuinely need to start with $10-20 million. Is that something you think about? Would a divergence like that ever be worth it to YC? Or is it like, “we don’t need to back every single type of company of all time?” [00:00:00] S2: We would like to back every single type of company of all time if we could. [00:00:00] S0: That’s actually the kind of thing I was curious about. When you’re thinking about YC growing, is the conversation like “we have our style and we like to get everything within that,” or is it “no, we’d like to back every company of all time”?
· Jack Altman, Garry Tan
[00:00:00] S0: That’s actually the kind of thing I was curious about. When you’re thinking about YC growing, is the conversation like “we have our style and we like to get everything within that,” or is it “no, we’d like to back every company of all time”? [00:00:00] S3: We’re generalists. YC funded Coinbase when crypto was like the weirdest thing. Brian Armstrong was on the risk team at Airbnb — in the anti-fraud team — and he was already in the family. He said, “How do I start a company? This is clearly the way to do it.” What’s funny is you could start 20 other Coinbase competitors but all of them died. When you’re early, it doesn’t matter. It matters more who the person is and what they believe, and then that person goes and creates the future. Being a generalist is an incredible thing, it’s truly the best. [00:00:00] S0: Is there a slice of the market, or a type of founder, that you feel like you want better exposure to, something you’re actively working on? [00:00:00] S3: Coming back to YC, one of the things we realized is that we have a huge media presence. On the other hand, on its own, if you just watch the YouTube channel it’s like “oh, this is something in the sky. I heard it’s a 1% acceptance rate.” People think that it’s maybe not for them. What we find is that all of our best people either know someone who did YC, or they met a partner directly at an event. We actually have to be in the community. We can’t just be up in the sky, on the internet. [00:00:00] S0: You can’t just wait for apps to come in.
· Jack Altman, Garry Tan, Jared Friedman, Harj Taggar
[00:00:00] S0: You can’t just wait for apps to come in. [00:00:00] S3: Jared led this. You got us to how many college campuses last year? [00:00:00] S1: Over 30 college campuses. We have a huge boots-on-the-ground effort now to go talk to undergrads everywhere. We just got back from a big trip to Europe. We’re going to India in the spring. To go back to your point about groups of people we’d love to see more of, we have a big effort here to do what we’ve done with undergrads over the last two years — which I think has been pretty successful — and expand that to grad students and people who are more like Brian Armstrong’s age, mid- to late twenties. [00:00:00] S0: I will say, in a good way because they’re unbelievably impressive, YC founders are young. In recent batches it seems like they’ve trended even younger. [00:00:00] S1: They have. [00:00:00] S0: Which makes sense. I think a big change like AI favors younger people for all sorts of reasons. [00:00:00] S3: For what it’s worth, I’m a late bloomer. I did YC when I was 27. [00:00:00] S0: I was 26. [00:00:00] S3: Late bloomers, high five. [00:00:00] S0: The old guys. But that’s the old guys for YC. [00:00:00] S2: Many of the biggest YC companies were started by founders in their mid to late twenties, DoorDash and Airbnb. [00:00:00] S0: Oh, that’s old. [00:00:00] S2: Yeah, super old. You should definitely quote me on that. [00:00:00] S0: “We have tons of old people in YC…” [00:00:00] S2: We have 26-year-olds.