YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Huang

lines on the record: 114
first: 2025-04-22
most recent: 2025-04-22
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

“Hulu. This was 2010. And so we were building a TV guide website for that era. I think in hindsight, it's just not a good business and very concentrated two-sided market where one side is extremely concentrated and the other side is super lazy, low willingness to pay.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly. So I do think we were falling down all the obvious traps of young people overrate your own problems. A lot of young people are attracted to like the problems they have in college, but college students aren't very representative of the average consumer. So anyway, from there, six months later, we had continued to build and hack on things and eventually the next batch we already had a prototype with users. It was still a terrible idea, by the way. But if you remember back to that period of time, this was when streaming content was coming online for the first time. So like Netflix and...”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can you come by again? Let's brainstorm. Let's try to figure out something for you guys to do. And we did that and still couldn't come up with something they were excited about. And then I think a week later, he released an essay, something to the effect of like why young people have bad ideas.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We applied to YC twice and the first time we didn't get in. I distinctly remember flying out to California for the interview and we interviewed with PG and when he called us that evening maybe they still do this like it's the same day response and he's like we love you guys we couldn't hate your idea more”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not even clear that's the thing I should be optimizing for, and I think one thing that was very liberating about reading PG was the sense that you don't have to ask for permission from other people, because that's what all the PhD programs are. You can actually figure out what you want to do and just go do it. There's this popular meme now, like you can just go do things. And I think it's a platitude. I think there's deep truth to it. I found it extremely enlightening. it reshaped my worldview of what I wanted to do. I was a math major doing applied math. I had learned to make websites growing up and messed around with Photoshop. A lot of kids did that. But I didn't really learn how to code or principles of computer science. Immediately at that time, I basically pivoted to a lot of the CS courses actually counted for the math major. So from there, just started to learn everything about how one would build things. And then with my room.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for me, it was very impactful because the meta takeaway was very much one of agency. I was in a headspace of going to MIT. My parents want me to do a PhD. I have to think about what I want to study and which places to apply to, like what's the thing you should do during the summer to start making research contributions.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about an act of extreme leverage, Paul Graham wrote some words on a website, and I think shifted the world in a dramatic way, opened up the universe to teach nerds how to build companies. And in a prior world where they'd be completely beholden to the NBA CEO. So I think that's just a generally interesting.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then was obsessed with figuring out what's the chain of thought that would cause someone competent to choose that. That brought me to discovering Paul Graham's essays and my combinator and learning about the entire Silicon Valley ecosystem.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a year above me and told me he was dropping out to join a little startup out in San Francisco called Dropbox, and he was, I think, the sixth or seventh employee there. It broke my world model at the time, which given the upbringing in parents, this very strong sense of one must not only get into a great college, one must graduate and maybe even do a PhD. But to drop out seemed insane. And yet this was someone I deeply respected and thought was tremendously capable. It wasn't someone who like failed out of his classes or was going to go pursue acting or something. Off the wall. It was a real moment for me because I”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the most memorable, it actually flows into next chapters. Startups are so in vogue now, but back then two thousand eight ish startups were still relatively new. Maybe if you went to Stanford, it was sort of the default thing a lot of people were focused on, but certainly at MIT, most people were the other typical tracks, finance, consulting, HFT. And I remember I had a close friend who”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, actually. So I went to MIT, and in hindsight, super special place. I actually didn't appreciate it at the time, but it's one of the highest concentrations of strange people on the planet. I think there aren't many of those centers of gravity. I think Silicon Valley is one. Crypto is one. But they're relatively rare. And I think there's a lot of generativity and interesting outlier type activity that emerges from those types of places. I also met my wife, which, again, not appreciated at the time, but now watching some of my friends navigate that post-college. I don't envy the environment people have to wade through.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's one of those only in hindsight things. It was just the water at the time. It's funny. I reflect back on family conversations and my parents would have friends over or introduced me to folks who they worked with. And every introduction would be almost like an honorific. They would say where that person went to college. So very deeply early, it was ingrained that this was something that defined the value of a person. And I think that's deeply mistaken, but was directionally what drove me at the start.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was very lucky they were, if you think about stereotypical Asian parenting, they were very liberal relative to what you'd imagine as the caricature, so they were very supportive later in life when I took risks and decided not to go down that path. But anyway, that was phase one. Phase two was probably a bit of a walk in the woods in college of naturally figuring out what's next. Phase three was building a failed startup. Phase four was learning to become an investor. And I think I'm now on phase five, which is building paradigm and figuring out my self-expression.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's see. I would say there's a childhood chapter where probably like a lot of other people the primary goal I had was getting into college. And in hindsight, I think that's for a lot of reasons very depressing and not something I want to bring up in my kids. But that was like a very primal thing in my life. Both my parents were PhDs and professors. And so becoming educated was the family North Star Directive. Yeah.”
2025-04-22 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Huang - Investing At The Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.420] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source