Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:35:33 · Gustaf Alstromer, Chaz Englander
[00:35:33] S2: So maybe if you're a builder and you enjoy seeing stuff in people's hands, the smaller the company you work for, maybe even your own company, the faster it gets in the customer's hands. [00:35:42] S0: 100% and enjoying that. I then think another different way to look at this is think about, I know it's maybe slightly morbid, if that's the correct word, but if you're lying on your deathbed and you look back at your life, what do you want from your life? And I think we do that a lot. And basically, what we conclude is we just want to have been impactful with our time. We want to have left the world a better place, but in a way that we've just built things that people enjoy using. And I think that's really what motivates us. But I think really that one point of you've really got to enjoy the journey. And we just love building. [00:36:23] S2: It sounds like if you were in history, you would give yourself basically the advice to the path that we ended up on. [00:36:28] S0: Yeah. Go all in. [00:36:29] S2: You wouldn't chase anything. [00:36:30] S0: Hell no. Go all in, go all in, like all in. And I think if anything, more is more in general. [00:36:36] S2: I remember when I met with Paul Graham sometime around the beginning of the batch, and I was doubting whether if this doesn't work out, like, maybe my career is fucked. He said something like, well, if you're 26 and you're poor, that will be the worst outcome. And probably most €26 don't have any money anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't make a big difference.
00:36:36 · Gustaf Alstromer, Chaz Englander
[00:36:36] S2: I remember when I met with Paul Graham sometime around the beginning of the batch, and I was doubting whether if this doesn't work out, like, maybe my career is fucked. He said something like, well, if you're 26 and you're poor, that will be the worst outcome. And probably most €26 don't have any money anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't make a big difference. [00:36:53] S0: Yeah. It's also just like the way I describe it is like, well, the worst case, like, the very worst case is you're going to learn so much over such a short period of time. And that is the worst case. Because often when you compare this to... Often now, when we're hiring people, we talk about their opportunity costs, right? I think a lot of the time, if you take a step back, those jobs or those roles, they're still going to be there in a year's time. Right? So the actual worst case is you've just learned a lot over a year. And I think if you frame it like that, then a lot more people would just get out and build stuff. [00:37:28] S2: And a lot of people that end up on these tracks, they're sort of like five years into investment banking. It's hard to step out of that. [00:37:35] S0: Super hard. [00:37:36] S2: But like it's just the risk that you wanna take, you wanna take early on because it's just like much harder to change when you're 30 and you have commitments and... [00:37:43] S0: Definitely. Way harder.
00:37:43 · Chaz Englander, Gustaf Alstromer, Arnie Englander
[00:37:43] S0: Definitely. Way harder. [00:37:45] S2: Yeah. When you're hiring people, people that come from finance or quant backgrounds, are they things that they have to unlearn about their job, either about the company they're working for or about the industry in order to work for a tech startup serving the same industry? [00:37:57] S0: First principle thinking, They [00:38:00] S1: just got to move faster. And again, this is probably more your realm than mine, but what we notice is we'll ask someone to do something well, they won't, but they will try and spend a day, two days putting together some sort of presentation, slide deck, and we're like, what the hell is going on? We need this now.' So it's things like that where you get caught up in the, the big company thinking, which makes sense in certain environments, but when you're working in a start up and you're wearing so many different hats, frankly, there's no time for that. So we really try and from day one, I think you in particular, really try and say, 'Look, we need this now,' instead of all these spreadsheets and slides.
00:38:00 · Arnie Englander, Chaz Englander
[00:38:00] S1: just got to move faster. And again, this is probably more your realm than mine, but what we notice is we'll ask someone to do something well, they won't, but they will try and spend a day, two days putting together some sort of presentation, slide deck, and we're like, what the hell is going on? We need this now.' So it's things like that where you get caught up in the, the big company thinking, which makes sense in certain environments, but when you're working in a start up and you're wearing so many different hats, frankly, there's no time for that. So we really try and from day one, I think you in particular, really try and say, 'Look, we need this now,' instead of all these spreadsheets and slides. [00:38:45] S0: I think that is the first lesson. It's like everything that you have learned for five years, try and unlearn immediately. I think just in a sense it's different. You've just got to move so much faster. I think building the plane, going down the runway is the best way to describe things. I think that is the quickest way to learn. It's different when you're where we are now, it's different. The business, we have large customers in production. That can't be the case. But in terms of the way that you think or the way that you go about your work, the fundamentals still need to remain the same. We are big on this first principles thinking, which I know is very much a terminology that is overused. But I think in general, that way of looking at the world is a better way to build a company.
00:38:45 · Chaz Englander, Gustaf Alstromer
[00:38:45] S0: I think that is the first lesson. It's like everything that you have learned for five years, try and unlearn immediately. I think just in a sense it's different. You've just got to move so much faster. I think building the plane, going down the runway is the best way to describe things. I think that is the quickest way to learn. It's different when you're where we are now, it's different. The business, we have large customers in production. That can't be the case. But in terms of the way that you think or the way that you go about your work, the fundamentals still need to remain the same. We are big on this first principles thinking, which I know is very much a terminology that is overused. But I think in general, that way of looking at the world is a better way to build a company. [00:39:33] S2: And you guys chose to do YC three times. Can you describe how you're thinking here?
00:39:33 · Gustaf Alstromer, Chaz Englander
[00:39:33] S2: And you guys chose to do YC three times. Can you describe how you're thinking here? [00:39:38] S0: The second and third time, it wasn't a financial thing. We still get asked, still. We've had loads of teams that... People that work for us that have gone on to even start YC companies or gone on to build some great companies, and we still get asked how we manage to maintain that, and I quote, YC culture throughout the life cycle of the company. So the way I sort of answer this is you cannot replicate that. I remember very clearly Michael Seibel in 2017, the first office hours we had, a young English lad, we report on our numbers. And I reported monthly. And I remember Michael being like, what the hell are you doing? Like, let's talk weekly, if not daily, if not hourly. And I think that culture never leaves a company. All right? That's the fact. The second aspect, which definitely cannot be overlooked, is the instant support network that you get. I think us being from Europe working seven days a week, it's very unusual, to say the least. And there's not many people that we can call on. And in fact, a lot of the people that we surround ourselves with outside of work, they fundamentally disagree with the way that we work, how we're building, and why we're building, particularly when we don't need to from a financial sense. I think that's different. Whereas in the Bay Area, particularly, and driven by YC and through YC, you get this instant network that you just... You you cannot get anywhere else.