Uncapped with Jack Altman
· Jack Altman, Garry Tan
[00:00:00] S0: It’s crazy. [00:00:00] S3: Something happened at the end of November when Opus 4.5 came out. I heard about it and I was like, “Hey, what’s going on?” The most interesting thing for us is that we’d been talking about it for years, been using it for years, and then it wasn’t really until December where it was like, “AGI is here guys, for code.” I feel like I could create in 80 hours something that I could not create with $5 million and five engineers in two years. [00:00:00] S0: Let’s stick with that, this coding topic. First, what are you trying to identify as greatness? If before this moment you needed to find great engineers, what is the thing you’re looking for now? How has that changed? Second, the startup advice has always been “write code, talk to users.” What is that now? [00:00:00] S3: Prompt and talk to users. [00:00:00] S0: But there’s a lot less time prompting.
· Jack Altman, Garry Tan
[00:00:00] S0: But there’s a lot less time prompting. [00:00:00] S3: This literally just happened and all of us have been collectively doing it. Harj did a project, Jared‘s coding all the time. Our whole team is using this stuff. We realized, “Hey, why don’t we actually put it in the application process?” For the first time, for the spring batch, you can upload a transcript of your Codex or Claude Code making a feature. We’re starting to figure out how to process it. We put it in a security sandbox because we figure it’ll be prompt-injected very quickly. You can tell a lot about whether someone can build just from how they prompt the agents. Do they know systems? For YC, you get a t-shirt that says “Make Something People Want” on day one. If you look at a résumé, you can sort of guess at whether they can make something, but you can’t really tell whether they can make something people want. You can look at their GitHub and maybe see if they can make something. The only way you can really tell if they can make something people want is if they did it already. [00:00:00] S0: And there’s not exactly a GitHub for prompting, if that’s what you’re asking people for.
· Jack Altman, Garry Tan, Harj Taggar
[00:00:00] S0: And there’s not exactly a GitHub for prompting, if that’s what you’re asking people for. [00:00:00] S3: But you can tell… Do they use plan mode? Do they think about systems? Are they prematurely optimizing? Are they over-engineering? Basically, what is a feature to them? What is the complete release? Do they think about the edge cases? How you do anything is how you do everything. My favorite Steve Jobs quote, he talks about how if you’re a carpenter, you can tell other really great carpenters. You don’t look at the front. Everyone looks at the front and they’re like, “This seems good.” But a great carpenter, an artisan, looks at the back of the cabinet. The back of the cabinet only other carpenters are going to look at. That was one of my favorite things. When I funded companies at Initialized, and when I was a partner at YC the first time around, that was the number one thing that I loved. Is there “game recognize game”? Would I go work for this person if I weren’t doing the thing I was doing now? [00:00:00] S2: This is how you spotted Apoorva with Instacart, right? [00:00:00] S3: Yeah. He came in and honestly it was craft again. He’d literally built an iPhone app that was a demo app. Claude Code didn’t exist, so he actually had to build it himself. The way I could tell was that — turning the cabinet to the back — he could scroll it and it scrolled really smoothly. That wasn’t true for that era of iPhone apps. The App Store and iOS apps were brand new. I feel like you guys do this all the time.
· Harj Taggar
[00:00:00] S2: To your question about how this changes the way we think about picking founders, I think it’s going to expand the net rather than necessarily change it. We’re all still in agreement that we absolutely want to fund genius engineers who aren’t necessarily using Claude Code. There’s going to be a Patrick Collison of every era and you want to fund those people. The way we’ve talked about it internally is that this is probably an era where we might find more Parker Conrads. I remember the application when Parker applied with Zenefits in 2013. It was extremely well-written, but single founder, not central casting, not quite technical. He was technical enough where had a demo but didn’t have a CS degree, wasn’t the traditional YC archetype. The only reason we interviewed him was that his previous company, SigFig, I had used it, it was a personal finance app. So he was clearly capable of doing stuff. The interview made it immediately clear that he deeply understood what he was talking about. He was super articulate, clearly a really strong product thinker. It worked out for him because he recruited a co-founder during the batch, and then obviously Zenefits had its thing, but Rippling is obviously huge. If Parker hadn’t got his co-founder during the batch, it would’ve been a totally different story. I suspect that the Parker Conrad of today is just in Claude Code, actually building quite sophisticated applications.
· Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S0: It’s also interesting because Parker’s one of the most commercially intelligent people there are. Coding applications are probably increasing the advantage for people with that shape. Obviously, I’m sure the real technical breakthroughs are always going to be really important.
· Garry Tan
[00:00:00] S3: This is markedly better than just looking at a resume. When I first came back to YC, I read all the feedback. We’re on r/ycombinator too with our anons and we know what people are saying. It was like, we should pay attention to this and frankly we need to do better than that. Parker did go to Harvard, but we shouldn’t fund someone because they went to Harvard. We should fund someone because they actually understand the user and are unbelievably tenacious. That’s actually universal for any product, any vertical, any set of customers: the most important thing is agency and taste. Agency is: I see this person, they have this problem, and I believe I can solve it using technology. Taste is: let me actually build the first version and get it in the hands of people. Did it work? How did it break? You go all the way into the weeds. Imagine hundreds of thousands of lines of code and you’re going through and fixing all the bugs. Think about the tireless, ceaseless gardener. Have you ever been to the Baha’i Gardens in Haifa? It is the most beautiful garden I’ve ever been to. There’s not a single weed, not a leaf out of place. I think the best products in the world, the best experiences in the world, are like that set of gardens. It’s because — it’s actually a religion — they really, really care.