YouSaid · the spoken record

Emmett Shear

lines on the record: 117
first: 2022-07-18
most recent: 2022-07-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, we managed to convince two of Paul's friends who'd worked with him at Yahoo. We convinced them to invest in us and give us, I don't know, like between the two of them, I think like $100,000, which is enough to keep running the business for a year effectively.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, how are you going to make money? Like, how will this make money eventually? And they're not looking to see that you have the right answer because there is no right answer. And I think one thing YC really deeply knows is that it's going to change. But do you have you thought about this? Do you have an answer? Does your answer make sense, at least in theory? And then how do you respond to being challenged? I think what YC is looking for is people who can communicate clearly, but most of all, people who win their challenged, they neither rebel nor acquiesce. And I think that's one of the most important traits in startup founders, actually.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The YC interview always goes kind of the same. It's funny, even then you had more time, but it's always the same thing, which is what is it you do again? Oh, how are you going to get customers? Could this be PPA? Yeah.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'd been a Paul Graham, I don't know, almost like a Paul Graham fanboy through college. I'd been reading his essays. I loved his writing. When I heard like, oh, man, he's doing an incubator. This is perfect. This guy's really smart. He's had a successful startup before. And we had no idea how to raise money or what we would do. We're going to start the company. And what that actually meant in terms of doing things was just other than make a product and put it on the internet, we weren't really sure. And so it seemed like this, it was this, what an amazing positive, lucky coincidence that this thing exists now. So we applied. We applied with Kego Calendar, the thing we were building. The original YC was heavy on like, show us a demo. And the interviews are now 10 minutes. At the time, you got 40 minutes per interview. What do you remember?”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What was our long range plan? I actually think, if I recall, we were going to sell advertising based on the better targeting data of knowing what events were open in your schedule, what times were open for you at night, and you'd be able to opt in basically to like, oh, are you interested in finding something for Friday night? Like click here to add it, to search right from your calendar for cool events you could go to. There's a bunch of reasons why that's a colossally terrible way to monetize a calendar, which I did not realize at the time because I wasn't a calendar user. But I'm pretty sure that was our plan.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, not really. I don't think we were that sophisticated. It was more like we wanted to do a startup, we didn't really know what that meant or how to go about it. We saw this missing piece of the universe. There's a male application that runs on the internet. There should be a calendar application that runs on the internet. Let's go make that. And we just made our own separate calendar application that worked like Gmail. And if you ask me what our...”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their calendar isn't on the internet, and it would be better if it was on the internet. I mean, the biggest thing that Google Calendar does and that Calendly does is it lets you run collaborative joint calendars with anyone around the world without having to be on the same exchange server the way that Outlook requires. That was the big win. Basically, we built Google Calendar roughly a year before Google Calendar was released”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so there's a lot of reasons why I don't think we were going to be successful. But the thing we did that was super important is we just kept grinding on it. We kept working and trying things, even though it was clearly not working.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, like right before a senior year, I think we all looked at Gmail and we said, this is the future of software. Like everything's going to be like Gmail in the future. I think we could all just see that. It was like having desktop software, but better. And what we did was we're like, oh, well, Gmail's missing a calendar. Like there should be a Outlook has a calendar. There should be a calendar that goes with a email client. And so we just started building it because that seemed like the right thing to do. And I look back at it and there are so many things wrong with the thought process we were going through there. We didn't know who we were building it for. We didn't use calendars. We didn't talk to anyone who used a calendar. We really didn't have any idea what would make a good calendar. We weren't heavy calendar users. Yeah.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“During college, mostly World of Warcraft, which came out my freshman year and is Incredible game that I played for the duration of college. And then had to get Justin when we were starting our company right before we graduated, he had a real talk conversation with me, which I think was very fair, which is, and I think you're going to have to choose the video game or the startup, which is it, World of Warcraft after the startup. And I chose the startup and quit World of Warcraft, which I think he was right.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Matt's a really good friend. He was one of Justin's roommates, freshman year. Matt is my most finance-oriented of my friends. And I don't mean that he's interested in money. I mean, like he looks at the entire world in terms of what's underpriced and what's overpriced and what should I be doing based on that today. And he looked around in college and he said, specifically enough that we should start a company, but we have better access to intellectual capital today than we ever will in the future at a lower opportunity cost. And so we should take advantage of that, which means we should start a company.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually purposefully didn't take any computer science because I loved programming already. I enjoyed programming a lot as a hobby. And I kind of didn't want to ruin it by making it a profession or a career. And then it got to be junior year. And I'd spent freshman and sophomore year taking entirely electives, whatever I wanted. And I was like, I have nothing that resembles a major. What am I going to take another 11 courses in in the next two years? And I was like, well, I know I'm good at programming. I know it's something I love. Maybe I'll try taking computer science. And I almost immediately was like, oh, well, this was.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally coincidental. No planning there at all. I suggestin have been planning to go to Wharton and kind of changed his mind at the last minute. And so that was real happenstance. And in college, I think... Certainly reconnected with Justin in a deeper way. One of the really interesting things was I found I liked his dorm just had a collection of people that I really connected with more deeply, more easily. And so I just wound up spending a ton of time with Justin, but also with all of his roommates. It was kind of an unofficial fifth member of the room.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I recall correctly, it was a Super Nintendo when we were, you know, and then later other stuff. So his house was the superior house for Hangout because there was more video games.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we were like, we were reasonably close. Maybe not in second grade, but certainly by third, fourth, fifth grade, we'd be over at each other's houses pretty often. I think I went over to his house more often via two brothers and more importantly, he had a video game system, which my parents would not buy for me.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We actually grew up three blocks away from each other. Like right almost next door, but I didn't know him until I was eight when I switched to Evergreen Elementary, where he was already attending. And yeah, we met in second grade and became friends almost immediately.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I used to get that question every interview. Then usually, what I would do actually is I'd ask them, well, first of all, just tell me, what do you watch TV? Oh, well, what do you watch? Oh, you like watching the NFL. You like watching football. Oh, interesting. Well, it turns out people who like video games do the same thing. But the best news fundamentally is I don't need them to understand it because I got it and the people watching got it, the people streaming got it for the people who loved it, it was self-evident the instant they saw it, like they were like, oh, this is, yes, this is what I want. This is what I've been waiting for.”
2022-07-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Twitch: Emmett Shear · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT