Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:30:58 · Harj Taggar, Garry Tan
[00:30:58] S3: I think what's going on is that we've always actually had hugely successful single founders. I think people don't realize this about YC. There's different sort of definitions of it, but for all intents and purposes, I'll put it with Instacart, Brian Armstrong with Coinbase, at least when the batch started, were single founders. [00:31:15] S0: Yeah. Parker Conrad got into YC as a single founder, and then I interviewed Lax Shrini, who ended up being his CTO. [00:31:22] S3: The bar for being able to, like, have the idea, be able to sell it, and be able to build it all by yourself was just really, really high. [00:31:31] S0: And that's actually totally doable. [00:31:34] S3: Yeah. I think that's what's going on. In that case, like those three are just like incredibly exceptional people. And so there's just, like, very, very few people who are capable of that. And now you can actually, like, get going. And so I think you just don't have to be quite that, like, exceptional, at least on one of those dimensions, the building part, to be able to get going. [00:31:49] S0: But net net, it's still valuable to have cofounders. It's still a measure of, like, you know, if your cofounders are super elite, like, that means you're probably super elite, and it just increases the chance of success by a lot. And...
00:31:49 · Garry Tan, Harj Taggar, Jared Friedman
[00:31:49] S0: But net net, it's still valuable to have cofounders. It's still a measure of, like, you know, if your cofounders are super elite, like, that means you're probably super elite, and it just increases the chance of success by a lot. And... [00:32:01] S3: In in each of those cases, they did bring on cofounders. I think in each of those cases, you just get going and they got traction and they added on co founders sort of at a certain point. And so maybe like the equity ownership is different or maybe the dynamic is just slightly different to the traditional, hey, like you start out and like the two of you in a room and you're completely fifty fifty. I don't know if wanna say that stuff in, but... [00:32:24] S2: I don't have the stats, but I have definitely seen a greater trend towards that. People adding co founders later in the company life cycle after the thing has already, like, gotten off the ground. [00:32:33] S3: I I think that will be the trend. I think we'll see more single founders in the batch, which we're already seeing starting the batch. But at least with the things that succeed, I still expect that they're gonna be adding co founders as the company progresses. [00:32:46] S2: Garry, do you also wanna talk about the trend towards like more experienced people starting companies?
00:32:53 · Garry Tan
[00:32:53] S0: So it does seem like people who have been around the block a few times are doing much much better. I think of Peter Steinberger as like sort of the canonical example. Like, you know, he's, I believe, in his early forties, and he'd been a dev manager. He'd worked on startups before. And then, you know, he sort of uniquely got extremely AI pilled with the clankers early. But then he just tried a lot of stuff. And then he knows what to build. And so that's one thing that I think is actually really encouraging. It's like, basically, if you've been around the block, you know where the, you know, where the dragons are. You sort of have taste, and then those people in particular are like unusually powerful right now. Yeah. I mean, there are just so many classic gate kept things that happen. It's like, oh, you know, you have to have a co founder, you need like, a certain set of, you know, cool investors to be into you. And like, now it's just less and less true. It's actually like, you need to know what to build. That's like, the high order bit now is you need to know what to build. And if you've lived a little bit, and you've been in places, and you're very opinionated, like, actually, now you might not have an excuse. Like, what's your excuse? Like, you've been this loudmouth on the Internet for so long. Like, you know, why are you not building something? Like, just pop open OpenCode and just go do it, you know? Like, put your money where your mouth is.
00:34:16 · Jared Friedman, Garry Tan, Diana
[00:34:16] S2: I also wonder if managing coding agents is actually, like, in some ways not that different from managing people. [00:34:22] S0: Oh, yes. [00:34:23] S2: And so, like, people like Peter or you or or Boris Cherny and, like, Toby from Shopify who who have had whole careers, like, managing teams of engineers, actually, like, take to this super well and can, like, spin up huge teams of coding agents and manage them maybe more effectively than even, like, a really smart 19 year old who hasn't had those years of experience. [00:34:42] S0: Yeah. We we can be a little bit less abusive to our agents, try to understand where they're coming from. You have to catch their emotions, like, 99.9% less. Yeah. So, yeah, it's pretty helpful. [00:34:57] S1: I wonder what's the concrete advice for someone that wants to get started and wanna build a company, like, right now in the current era.
00:34:57 · Diana, Garry Tan
[00:34:57] S1: I wonder what's the concrete advice for someone that wants to get started and wanna build a company, like, right now in the current era. [00:35:06] S0: I mean, oh, just start prompting. I mean, opening up GPT six today was pretty wild. I mean, just that moment where your agents are, you know, palpably smarter. They... You know, a bunch of things that you've been annoyed about, like these bugs that, you know, you haven't had time to deep deep dive yourself. You just be like, actually, could you just go back to the list of things that you couldn't figure out? Like, look at your... You know, all of our last chats, and, you know, anything that looks like you didn't figure out, like, try to figure it out now, And it'll do it, like, every single time. Like, you know, it's... What a weird moment we are in history where you wake up in the morning, you like wire up a new model, and then these things that even a month ago, you're just like, why isn't it working? It just starts working. And like, you know, to think that that might be this thing that we get to do for the next eighteen, twenty four months, thirty six months, like, who... You know, I don't know when when it ends, but that's coding in the time of AGI, I guess. Well, that's all we have time for for today. But if you can't tell, we're all pretty excited about what's going on right now, and you should be too. So we can't wait to see what you build.