00:02:47 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:02:47] S1: try embedded and, you know, see what people think. So... Okay. So let's perhaps say our goal page would take a slightly different approach, which is that
00:02:55 · Elad Gil
[00:02:55] S0: And by the way, sorry to interrupt. I do think things are faster now. I was... But, yeah, I'll do that. And so I figured that part is dramatically faster and better. And then I'd also say it's faster in two ways. One is you can build things much faster, which makes a big difference. But the second way is customers are very interested at trying stuff in a way that I haven't seen in my lifetime. And because of AI, every CEO has the edict of you need to do something in AI. What are you gonna tell you to worry about AI, and how you gonna do AI? And so there's radical openness to trying things that didn't exist three, four years ago. And that's really important in a way that I think few people really understand. And so I remember when, I was diligencing, I I invested in Harvey, the High Legal Company, really early in their first round, and then I led their series b. And, for Harvey, I remember calling their customers as due diligence, and I called these big law firms, and I asked them. And usually law firms, by the way, are really bad adopters of technology. Right? They're very slow. They're hesitant to change. There's a big security reviews. Like, many legal laptops are completely locked down. Right? You can't download things onto them without, like, CIO permission at the law firm. So I call these people running these law firms, you know, the the 10 biggest law firms in the world, and I ask them, what is the biggest change you expect to the party and why you're adopting it and all the rest? And even two, three years ago, the insight was so interesting and unexpected where they said, we think this will augment associates the point where we'll need fewer of them for the same book of business. Let me... We can grow our book of business quite a bit. And we grow partners from associates. So who are gonna be our future partners? Are we gonna have enough associates per partner to actually have the right number of partners? Like, it's part of the training. It's part of choosing people. It's a selective criteria. It's the filter. It's, like, whatever you wanna call it. And I thought that was fascinating as an insight. And this is insight, like, three years ago or whenever it was two years ago. And so I do think there's other aspects that are really overlaid on this that are, like, super fascinating.
00:04:46 · Aditya Agarwal, Elad Gil
[00:04:46] S1: Would you say that as an extension of that observation that there is more openness to buying today than has been probably in our generation is that if your stuff is not taking off today, if you're having a hard time selling your thing today, then that's a pretty bad spot to be at. [00:05:02] S0: A 100%. And I take it a step further, which is even a couple years ago... So I think there's there's a bunch of conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that I either think is always mostly wrong. And an example of that is you always need a cofounder. And you look at the biggest market caps in the world, and Michael Dell didn't have a cofounder, and Jensen didn't have a cofounder. And, you know, you go through company by company. Steve Jobs is a dominant founder. There was two founders, but he was really the main one. Although wasn't it, of course, built everything, initially. But you're kinda your company by company and either it's unequal in most cases until YC. Right? YC and, Google was roughly equal, although Larry had a little bit more stock even earlier. [00:05:46] S1: Larry Ellison, Oracle, no cofounder.
00:05:46 · Aditya Agarwal, Elad Gil
[00:05:46] S1: Larry Ellison, Oracle, no cofounder. [00:05:48] S0: No cofounder. Right? So you look at many of the... Gates cofounded with so many, but then he really became the sole founder when Paul Allen left. So, over and over, he's either unequal or solo for many of the biggest sins. Now there's lots of people who are co founders who been incredibly successful, in some cases equal, in some cases unequal. If you actually look at cap tables as companies go public, you actually realize that most sins were unequal. And it was really y c that normalizes equality. So, anyhow, there's a lot of conventional wisdom, that I just think is wrong. [00:06:19] S1: I mean, we don't we don't love equality. We love. Right? [00:06:22] S0: Yeah. No. I I I think, Weihing is important for startups. People often ask me what is the single biggest determinant of culture in a startup, and I say winning. You know, it's not the kombucha. It's not the ping pong table. It's, you know, not the number of GPUs you have up, but that is exciting. It's winning. But anyhow, back to the original question. The companies that we said I've been involved with that have tended to work have tended to work early. And it's not like we're gonna grind for seventy years and then the thing will work. And it's usually something starts working really fast.
00:06:22 · Elad Gil, Aditya Agarwal
[00:06:22] S0: Yeah. No. I I I think, Weihing is important for startups. People often ask me what is the single biggest determinant of culture in a startup, and I say winning. You know, it's not the kombucha. It's not the ping pong table. It's, you know, not the number of GPUs you have up, but that is exciting. It's winning. But anyhow, back to the original question. The companies that we said I've been involved with that have tended to work have tended to work early. And it's not like we're gonna grind for seventy years and then the thing will work. And it's usually something starts working really fast. [00:06:54] S1: Yeah. It's actually interesting you bring up that particular statement. One of the precise lines I remember from when you spoke last was actually that for startups they can often just kind of be wandering around for a while, but when stuff works, tends to work very quickly. And there's some cases where, you know, success happens on slow curve, but the best companies, when it starts turning the flywheel, it turns even quicker. So I think it... I'm combining the two things. What I'm really hearing is that if in today's day and age, think you you're building something or but you're having a hard time selling it, that's a pretty bad signal because I agree that there's propensity to buy across almost every vertical, including old school regulated verticals that we haven't seen in a while. And also, if it's working, it should be working quickly. Right?
00:07:39 · Elad Gil
[00:07:39] S0: Yeah. This actually ties into competing schools of thought in Silicon Valley around, are there enough founders in the world? So the YC school of thought is there should... If you just have more founders, more magical things will happen. And on the alternative viewpoint of the world, and I think both are partially correct, is there's only so many markets that are open in a given moment in time, and, therefore, there's only so many markets in which in which you could build a big company. And they're open because of a regulatory change. They're open because of customer behavior. They're open because of technology shift. Right? Right now, we're going through a simultaneous massive shift in technology and a massive shift in buying behavior. So many more markets are open right now than I've ever seen in my lifetime.