YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Graham

lines on the record: 85
first: 2023-08-09
most recent: 2023-08-09
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

“The thing is though, all universities have a sort of admissions process that's corrupt in that way, except possibly Caltech. Caltech might actually do undergrad admissions properly. And so since they're all messed up, Harvard does still have this draw compared to the others.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I was already very well aware of this phenomenon. So to the extent YC uses anything like that, we were definitely thinking YC was started within the convex hull of Harvard, like the places Harvard spread out through Cambridge, but like YC's original office was within it. And so we've consciously tried to make YC the Harvard of startups, no question about that. We had the model right there.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why it was good at art. It wasn't some weird Florentine thing about art or some special Florentine sense of aesthetics. They were just the most progressive city. It's really too bad that the far left has hijacked that word. It's such a good word. Maybe we can get it back. But I remember thinking I've gone to the wrong place. I went to the place where the puck used to be. Hundreds of years ago.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I remember there was one moment I was sitting in Florence. And I realized I had gone to the wrong place. I was studying Florentine history, all the buildings are right around you. I found myself thinking Damn, Florence was New York City in fourteen fifty. That was 60,000 people.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was certainly a comparable process A lot of technical type founders hate the idea of doing sales and going and talking to people. And so you can tell them, look, just go do this. And you know after a few months they'll be used to it. They may never like it. I mean, I would hate doing that myself now, but they can at least do it.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. You ask me these hard questions. I don't have time to think about them. Did that have anything to do with, I don't think I've ever consciously used anything I learned there.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was comfortable, totally comfortable jumping off a cliff with a hang glider on my back, moderately comfortable flying Asna one hundred seventy two, who where the instructor had just turned off the engine and said, okay, land it, because the glide ratio is actually similar to a hang glider. I'm still afraid of getting on an airliner. That shows you how irrational these things are. But when I finally did get on an airliner, my God, it was like a spaceship compared to the planes I'd been flying. It was fabulous. And it totally worked. My fear of flying was completely cured.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're afraid of flying, how could you learn how to hang light? But the answer is you learn how to hang glide gradually. You start by just running along the flat. And if there's a headwind, maybe you feel a little lift, right? And then you go 10 feet up the hill and run as fast as you can and you reach a total altitude above ground level of a foot, right? You're not afraid when you're a foot above the ground. So you go out a little further up the hill until a month later you're like jumping off a cliff with a hang glider on your back. And so after I was good at hand gliding, I took flying lessons. So there's this intermediate point where”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When there are common elements, my god, do we act quickly to fix that? And so I remember early on there was this company doing email. If you wanted to send mass emails, I forget what their name was. And this was back when we were reading the applications. If the first reader gave it a sufficiently low grade, it would never be seen by anybody else. So the first reader who was Robert Morris, who's extremely, he was like designated wet blanket of YC gave this application a C and with the comment spam company. That was that nobody ever saw it again. And they ended up going public. And so after that, I changed that thing in the software, made it so that no one would ever see something. No second reader would see it. After that, every application had to be seen by at least two people.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“YC, one of the reasons I'm so contemptuous of university admissions is that I am also in the admissions business, and I am obsessed. I not only measure, we not only measure when we fail, but we're obsessed with the failure cases. YC has a list of all the companies that we've missed that have applied to YC and we've turned down and they've gone on to be successful. And we spend a lot of time like someone thinking about past injuries. What's the concept?”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No more like they're near some idea that we're familiar with, and we just assume they must be doing that idea. And they say, oh, no, we're not doing that. We're doing this. I'm like, oh, okay, thank goodness. And then they get extra points because not only they're not doing the stupid thing, but they understand that the stupid thing is stupid. So now they get extra credit for what we were subtracting from. In the past.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just not going to Yeah, you're not going to change. I didn't say seven minutes is enough to tell, notice. I said seven minutes is the point where you're probably not going to change your mind.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've thought a lot about where the cutoff is. Like where's the point? If you made a graph, what's your probability of changing your mind, right? After minute number N. An after minute number one or two, the probability of changing your mind is pretty high. I would say YC interviews could actually be seven minutes instead of ten minutes, but ten minutes is already almost insultingly short, and so we kept it at ten. We could have made it seven.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why I'm mauling over what actually goes on, because there is this skill there. The weird thing about YC interviews is in a sense they're a negotiation, right? And in a negotiation, you're always saying, oh, I'm not going to pay a lot for that. It's terrible. It's worthless, right? And yet. In YC interviews, the founders often walk out thinking, wow, our idea is a lot better than we thought, just because what we do, you know what we do in YC interviews? We basically start YC. The first ten minutes of YC is the interview. So you see what it's like to work with people by working with them for 10 minutes. And that's enough, it turns out.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Near London only in the sense that everything in England is near everything else by American standards. It's not really that London was the center of ideas. There were a lot of smart people there, but things were more spread out. Be careful with English history there. Back to this idea, though, of how to get people to be more ambitious. It's not just introducing him to other ambitious people. There is a sort of skill to blowing up ideas, blowing up not in the sense of destroying, like making them bigger, right? There is a skill to it. There is a skill to it to take an idea and say, okay, so here's an idea. So how could this be bigger? There is somewhat of a skill to it.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to new circles which will raise their sights. Maybe, maybe. That is true. When you read autobiographies, there's often an effect when people go to some elite university after growing up in the middle of the countryside somewhere. They're suddenly become more excited because there's a critical mass of like minded people around. But I don't think that's the main thing.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Semi average network question we should talk about that some more though because that really is an interesting question yeah Imagine how amazing it would be if all the ambitious people could be more ambitious. That really is an interesting question. And there's got to be more to it than just the fact that I don't have to do the work.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, okay. How do I do it? People are, for various reasons, for multiple reasons. They're afraid to think really big. There are multiple reasons. One, it seems overreaching. Two, it seems like it would be an awful lot of work, right? And so as an outside person, I'm like an instructor in some fitness class. And so I can tell someone who's already working as hard as they can. All right, push harder. It doesn't cost me any effort. And surprisingly often, as in the fitness class, they are capable of pushing harder, and so A lot of my secret is just being the person who doesn't have to actually do the work that I'm suggesting they do.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boy, what a fabulous question I wish you'd ask me that an hour ago so I could have had some time to think about it between But you're clearly good.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People should do some work. People should put when I talk to people who are in their teens or early 20s about starting a startup, I tell them instead of sitting around thinking of startup ideas, you should be working with other people on projects and then you'll get a startup idea out of it that you probably never would have thought of and you'll get a co-founder too, right? So I wish people would do more of that. You can get co-founders. Just work with people on projects. You just can't get co-founders instantly. You've got to have some patience.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe open AI is a special case because you have to have giant warehouses full of GPUs. You can't just mess around and throw something out there and see if it works. Maybe it requires some amount of advanced planning for something on that scale. I don't know. I don't know what he meant by it. Or, and I also don't know what it's like inside OpenAI, really. So I don't know either.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, but he's not a non-technical guy. He's not just some business guy. He's a technical guy who also is very formidable. And that's a good combination.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I meant something very specific in that essay. Incidentally, I talk in that essay about how I was talking to a founder, and I was talking about how Microsoft was this threat. And you could see he was clearly puzzled. Like, how could Microsoft possibly be threatening? I didn't mention who the founder was, but it was actually Zuck. It was Mark Zuckerberg who was puzzled that Microsoft could be a threat. And still, to this day, if you ask founders, are you afraid that Microsoft might do what you're doing? None of them are. So it's still not a threat to startups. Yeah, it makes more money now, but it's still not a threat like it used to be. It doesn't matter in the sense of factoring into anyone's plans for the future. No startup is thinking, I better not do that because Microsoft might enter that and destroy me.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“VC has been dwindling in the sense that they have smaller and smaller percentages of companies. If you go back and look at the stories from the 1980s, they would do these rounds where they would get 50% of the company. And even when YC started, they would get 30, and now it's down to 10 in these rounds. God knows what they're called. They keep renaming the rounds. But for a given round size, the amount of equity they get is much smaller than they used to.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growth. You've got to have high growth rates because VCs, it's so risky investing in startups, investing in these early stage companies that maybe you don't even have any revenues. So the only thing that can counterbalance the fact that half the companies completely fail is that the ones that don't fail sometimes have astonishing returns.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not necessarily, not as true. Part of the reason you want to find young founders who've done stuff from side projects is that it guarantees the idea is not bullshit. Because if young founders sit down and try to think of a startup idea, it's more likely to be bullshit because they don't have any experience of the world. Older founders can do things like start supersonic aircraft companies or build something for geriatric care and actually get it right. Younger founders are likely to get things wrong if they try and do stuff like that. So it's just a heuristic. It's a heuristic for finding matches between young founders and ideas.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strongly suspected. Yeah, yeah. Some people did, but certainly not everyone. So I don't know if this is true. I don't know if this is true. I'll investigate this summer. We're going to go back to YC and talk to some founders and I'll talk to the partners and I'll see what's going on. Because I had a mental note to check and see if this was actually true.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Patrick Collison probably didn't seem to most people to be the big store. And you can prove this because if he had, they would have invested in early stripe rounds and they didn't. So anybody who claims they knew early on that Patrick Collison was going to be a big star, show me the equity.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could be because I'm not even sure this is true. It could be that it's not actually true and that there's something else going on like, for example, people manage, if you look like athletes, for example. Athletes learned how to stay good for longer. And so you have people who are really international quality soccer players at age 34, right? And that didn't used to happen back in the days of Johann Kreuf, smoking cigarettes between halves. They didn't last till 34. And so it might have seemed like all the good football players are 34. And it's just an artifact of them lasting longer.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no, it's what they did in the story. What they did in the state, that something went wrong, and instead of giving up, they persevered.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Determination, it's hard to judge by looking at the person. The way you would judge determination, because people act determined. People think they're supposed to act determined. No one walks into their Y combinator interview thinking, I need to seem diffident. Nobody thinks that. They all think they're supposed to seem tough, which is actually really painful and stressful. It would be better if they just were themselves, because someone trying to act tough is just, ugh, it's so painful to watch. But the way you tell determination is not so much from talking to them as from asking them stories about things that have happened to them. That's where you can see determination.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can tell if people know what they're talking about when they come and talk about some idea, especially some technical idea I can tell if they know if they actually understand the idea or if they just have a sort of reading the newspaper's level of understanding of the thing.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's all the people. The earlier you're judging startups, the more you're just judging the founders. So it's location for real estate, right? The founders are like that. So yeah, sure, which is why the earlier stage you invest, the more you want to have these people who are good judges of people.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partly, I just don't have as much natural ability, and partly I just don't care as much about these things, where the conversations we have are not Paul, you can't wear that. They're like, Paul, you can't wear that. And I'm like, really? Why not? What's wrong with this? I just don't care as much.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Practically everything to do with people. She's a real expert on people, and like social protocol, what to wear at events, what to say to someone, anything like that.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source