Uncapped with Jack Altman
· 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.
· Jack Altman, Jared Friedman, Harj Taggar
[00:00:00] S0: On that topic, a piece of advice I’ve found myself changing on a little bit over the years is that it used to feel a little bit more like you could just ship something broken fast and then iterate from there. I still think that’s a good general mindset. But I do feel like the bar for products is just so high now. The quality of a software product at Series A seems really high to me lately. How do you guys advise people as they’re getting MVPs out? [00:00:00] S1: If Garry was able to ship 70,000 lines of code in a week while also running YC at the same time… [00:00:00] S0: And raising kids. [00:00:00] S1: Then the bar for what two founders working on their idea full-time could do before they interview with YC should be a lot higher. [00:00:00] S2: And we see this in the batches. A few weeks into the batch, some of the groups do what we call a product showcase now. You just get up there and give a quick demo of what you’ve built so far. Every six months over the last three years, the bar for what you should demo even a few weeks into the batch just keeps going up and up. [00:00:00] S0: It also makes me wonder. Inside a batch, a company ought to be able to pivot more times than they used to be able to. A company ought to be able to try stuff, see if they get traction in a few weeks, and if they don’t, move on. Are you seeing that happen? I know a lot of this is new, but do you feel like that’s going to be happening? Is it happening? [00:00:00] S1: Absolutely. We’re seeing companies try many things during the batch.
· Jared Friedman, Jack Altman, Harj Taggar
[00:00:00] S1: Absolutely. We’re seeing companies try many things during the batch. [00:00:00] S0: Do you advise in that direction? I felt like historically there was a YC school of thought. I interpret it as: ship fast, iterate, see where you’re at, go from there. I’ve interpreted in contrast the Keith Rabois school of thought as: you’re a movie producer, dream your movie and then ensure it happens, and don’t let anybody say no. [00:00:00] S2: I feel like the YC job is so much more, almost on the psychology therapist end of the spectrum on this stuff. At least for me, a lot of it is going off the vibe of the founder. I don’t really have a blanket view on whether you should pivot quickly and give up on this idea or stick with it for a long time. Usually when you’re meeting with founders, you can just tell if someone’s been working on something and they just never seem excited about it, and two weeks in, they’re still not very excited about it. It’s hard to tell them, “you just need to persevere and keep going.” It’s usually better for them to find the thing they have the spark about. What do you think?