Your job is to be an optimist.
Your job is to believe amazing things about what can you do with your life and what can you do in the world when you're young.
That's why the world needs young people.
This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell, and today we're going to talk about our advice for high schoolers.
It's been a little while.
It's been a little while.
So maybe the place to start, because I think that oftentimes young people are in a rush, maybe we need to start by saying the startup game isn't going away.
And look, I think to set this up,
We know a lot of young people watch these videos.
We know they like startup content.
We know they may even anonymously be involved in startups on Discord.
For the folks that apply to YC, a lot of them are literally in high school.
So we understand who you are if you're watching this, or if you know someone like this, you can forward them the video.
But we want to speak directly to you high school students who are trying to figure out who are ambitious and want to be a part of what's happening in the tech world, in the startup world, and aren't really sure where to begin.
Maybe the first analogy I give you, and this will immediately age me, so I apologize.
I was a big Final Fantasy VII player.
You play Final Fantasy VII?
The basic thing I learned in Final Fantasy VII was that you can fight the boss at a certain level and get your ass kicked.
Or you can grind for like, you know, 10 more hours and fight the boss and actually like kick their ass.
And I think that this analogy applies to a lot of things in the real world and specifically in the startup world, where like investing and leveling yourself up can produce a lot of benefits later on, like deferring a little bit of that satisfaction of getting started right now.
So you can upskill, makes you 10 times more powerful.
But, let's be clear, you have to be upskilling during that time.
Yeah, you gotta be grinding.
Like, the grind has to happen.
If I just stood there and didn't grind, my character got no better.
And it was cool, in a video game, you see grinding.
You can see the character leveling up.
And learning his spells a little bit.
But in the real world, let's talk a little bit about grinding.
What's the kind of grinding?
What's the kind of upskilling?
that you would advise high schoolers to do?
Well, the most obvious and straightforward one is learn how to code obvious.
Like it's pretty tricky even if you think, hey, I'm not going to be a lot of people say to me, the younger folks, oh, I don't want to be a coder my whole life.
I want to be a product person.
Well, you should still learn how to code.
It's really hard to make an argument if you're a young person, why you shouldn't have that skill in your skill tree.
You didn't know how to code.
And literally, I would say there are many moments in the early stage of a company where I felt borderline useless.
And certainly I didn't have the power to impact the product anywhere near as much as my other three co-founders who are software engineers.
This is such an obvious one.
Like there's all these YC companies that help people learn how to code.
So even if you have some complicated relationship with maybe I don't want to be a programmer.
That's fine, learn the skill.
It's like learning how to cast spells or something.
Well, I'll push even harder.
Like, get this complicated view of I don't want to be a coder out of your head.
Like, the coders are the most powerful people inside of software companies.
The people who code are the most powerful.
They're the most highly compensated.
They're the hardest to replace.
They often have the best ideas.
They often have the easiest path to implementing their ideas by far.
They're the power center.
Sometimes people on this coding thing are like, well, I didn't grow up coding or I wasn't like a 13 year old whiz kid like people I know in high school.
I'm just trying to argue, you don't need to be that.
If you have the right ambition and grind mentality to be willing to learn, of course you can do it.
Even if you're 19 or 20, it's never too late to learn that stuff.
Number two, we talked about this a little bit.
design, learning how to use basic design software.
This is one that kind of blows my mind because when I think back to my startups, I had to power up, you know, Photoshop.
We use this thing called ramp back in the day.
Like basically if a button needs to be made and we didn't have a designer,
Yes, make the button, you know?
Like, you don't even have to look that good.
And so this is a skill that anyone can grasp for.
And like, there's examples of good design and bad design all over the internet, right?
I think the third one is launching products.
Like, man, if you could get a product out,
It doesn't have to be used by any people.
It doesn't have to just like actually going through the full emotion of coming up with an idea for a little side project and releasing it and handing it to someone.
Because you're doing reps.
Like one of the things I noticed at YC is a lot of the folks that later on become great founders.
They worked on projects in high school that may not be commercially like venture funded companies, but they were like pretty cool.
And so one of the examples I always think of was back in the 90s, there was a computer program called Winamp.
And that's how you would listen to the MP3s you downloaded from Napster.
And some high school kids, Mark Zuckerberg and Adam D'Angelo, I believe, built a music recommendation plug-in for Winamp.
And it was quite popular.
I think it was called The Brain or something like that.
Something like that, yeah.
And so it was just like a free plug-in.
And it was quite popular.
And they made it when they were in high school.
And I don't think it had anything to do with what they did later on in life, but they knew how to write code.
They knew how to make something that themselves wanted, which was music recommendation for Winamp.
And I think it got like millions of downloads.
They went through all the motions the startup founder has to, but in this kind of like no stakes.
Yeah, it wasn't a business, at least to my understanding.
Maybe they thought it was, but it was more of making something cool.
And this sort of story comes up a lot in some of the founders that we fund is that they do stuff like this.
And you'll ask them, well, why were you doing that?
And they almost don't understand the question.
It's their nature to build things and release them.
So again, the advice part is, find low stakes things you can work on, give them to the world.
And again, I think there's a lot of the advice if you want to be in the music industry, if you want to be a writer, a lot of the advice if you listen to the greats.
to young people is do the reps.
And even if you write the poem and don't show it to anyone, or even if you are in a bunch of bands that don't make it and break up, you got the reps in when you were young.
The next one that comes up a lot, if you're gonna be a sort of founder one day, you gotta learn how to talk to people.
Gotta learn how to make friends.
And needless to say, I think that this is a skill that people kind of assume you can't learn.
like assume like, oh, some people are just really social and other people are just shy and like, I can't change that.
But I know you and I have seen this with YC founders like massively change.
This is 100% a learnable skill.
And anyone who says otherwise is really doing you a disservice.
I think what's so interesting about this one is just like the previous examples, the way you get better at it is you suck at it first.
And you have to be willing to be uncomfortable.
Again, I think my high school mentality, I don't know if you felt the same way, is you believe too much that your identity then, like that's a nerd, that's a jock, that's a, like it was like, you would put people and sort people into buckets, like they were like permanent.
That shit is not permanent.
Everyone could be anything.
yes if they choose to yes and so you can make a choice if you're like well i'm not really you know a people person or like i'm not the kind of person that would go and talk to everyone at a party or whatever like yeah you could do that totally do that well it is so weird to me because looking back to high school it was such a like
It was such an environment where my interactions with people didn't matter really.
How many high school people are you still really close with?
So one, that reputation is not going to fall you in the real world.
And two, you can experiment.
You can be whoever you want to be.
If you make a fool of yourself, you go to college, you're going to see those people ever again.
I think it's totally fine.
And I think that the other thing that I learned about this is that everyone else feels shy too.
Even the people who you think don't feel shy.
Even the people who you think, oh, they make a bunch of friends.
Everyone has that thing inside of them, being a little bit like, oh man.
And I think when you're older, you get that?
Yes, you get it all the time.
But man, you don't get that.
You don't get that the popular kids have their own thing they're working on that they're struggling with.
The person that you're afraid to go talk to is the same person who would probably like someone to come talk to them.
I think another one here is how to help people.
I think that what's tricky about being a startup founder is you have to be empathetic.
You actually have to care about your customers, you have to care about your users.
I think this is something you can start practicing early.
I remember doing this, and it was this really weird story.
I remember tutoring some kid in high school.
I'll tell you, I'll be honest, right?
I was doing it to check the box on the like national merit scholarship, whatever the contest of the thing.
And I remember, you know, I was maybe 11th grade and I was shooting this ninth grader.
And I remember the parents on the second or third time I came just looking at me and smiling and being like, and I realized, oh my God, like,
They really, really, really want their kid to learn.
And they are so happy that I'm taking time.
And they're still so happy that I'm taking time out of my schedule to help this kid.
And I was like, oh my god.
That's when it clicked a little bit where I was like, if you help someone, they'll really appreciate.
If you actually help them, if you care.
I actually took it more seriously.
It was funny because I remember there was one time where I screwed up and I couldn't make it.
I was like, oh my God, they're going to fire me.
I was supposed to be there.
And they were like, totally fine.
They were like, just come back next week.
And I think you might find that with your customers.
Even if you screw up, like if you really care and you're really helping them, they're not gonna fire you.
They're not gonna fire you.
It is so rare to find products where people who actually care.
Especially from young people.
Again, people are really impressed when young people
It's a very easy way to fit.
It's a little controversial, right?
Like how to play the credential game.
This one's tricky because I'd like to say we live in a world where credentials don't matter.
But we don't live in that world, right?
So how would you tell a high schooler to think about this game?
There's the people that love the system and embrace the system, like the teacher's pets.
And then there's the people that see the system for what it is and they want to rage against the machine and destroy the system.
And you know, I was a little bit more on that side.
God, yes, the Stanford kid.
But the key thing is, I'm talking to a high school priest.
I'm just trying to say, like, when you see this.
When you see how the world works, you're like, man, this is not ideal.
I think there's one way to say it.
And to the extent, you can learn to work
to understand the rules of the game and play the game with credentials and realize that leveling up on the credential game will help you with your long-term goals.
I think that's much better than rejecting the system out of hand.
It's basically either extreme is bad.
Fundamentally, you understand the system is somewhat arbitrary.
If you're smart enough, you understand that.
With that understanding, you can reject the system, and then because you don't have the right credentials, it'll hold you back.
You can somehow not understand the initial point.
Think the system is the filter for merit completely.
and then get very disappointed in our life when you realize that all these credentials don't mean you as far as person in the room.
Or you can try to get the system to work for you.
Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
It's a centrist philosophy.
Which is you acknowledged some of the shit.
But also, if you opt out of it completely, you're kind of just hosing yourself.
And I think that this mentality is really important because I think that a lot of people feel like the system's operating on them
But I think what they should feel is the system is a tool they can use.
If you understand it, you can use it.
And you can use it to accomplish whatever goal you want to.
And so this idea that it's operating on you, I think we're trying to break.
All right, let's talk about fads.
There have been a lot of fads.
Yeah, well, I think it's easy, especially when you're young, to just get caught up in stuff, whatever the thing is.
And some of the things are pretty cool.
Again, I was really into the internet.
But that was a new thing.
I was really, really, really into it.
And obviously that stuck around.
Certainly there's a lot of young people that got super into crypto.
There's young people that got really into stock trading recently with Wall Street Buds and Reddit.
Like, you'll see people get really into stuff.
In the Zuckerberg case, building a Winamp plug-ins, that was part of the Napster thing.
But where could it go too far, Michael?
The tricky bit about fads, this is kind of like what we said before about understanding the credential system.
The fads are just like another system, right?
And I think you kind of have to understand that some things stick because they create a lot of value and other things are just kind of passing with the time.
And I think what's really important for young people to start to understand is like how to distinguish between the two.
Like fads stick when they really add value, and fads pass when they don't.
And if you can have a nose for when something is adding value, when it's actually helping people, if you can train yourself on that, then that's a really important skill.
we see the opposite of this in the startup world all the time.
We're like, COVID happens, everyone wants to have a Zoom startup.
And it's like, the Zoom guys thought people would lead a video conference way before COVID, right?
And you mentioned Robinhood.
Oh, now, you know, Wall Street bets, bam, I need to make a Robinhood better.
It's like, even the Robin guys were before Wall Street bets.
It's like, the fad is often hiding what's really going on.
And like, if you can kind of pierce through that, you can figure out real value, fake value, temporary value, long term value.
And I think that, um, that helps a lot.
And you can probably as a young person, look at what's going on in your life right now and try to figure out what's a fat and what's going to stick, you know, next one.
how to be excited about technology.
We came up in this weird era, I guess.
I didn't think it was weird, but looking back I guess it was weird, where everyone thought technology was cool and making the world a better place.
A lot of the way we understand the world is framed via journalism.
And one thing, again, for young people, they don't have context on this, but it used to be journalists were all emphatically excited with no downsides, no reservations, no reservations.
And they would debate how great it was.
The debate was like, yeah, yeah, we know it's great, but just how great?
And who's making it the better, the fastest?
And so it was hard to see any problems with it.
And in this current university we live in, it's the opposite.
Yeah, this is bad, a lot of these people are bad.
Every new technology, how is it going to try to screw us, exploit us?
You know, yada, yada, yada.
And let's be clear, both extremes are incorrect.
That's correct, yeah, there's fair points.
It's 100% there are fair points.
But sometimes when I talk to young folks, they internalize too much of the current thing.
And I think I don't see how that helps you when you're young.
Your job is to be an optimist.
Your job is to believe amazing things about what can you do with your life and what can you do in the world when you're young.
That's why the world needs young people.
Yeah, so I think on this one, the real trick is like,
Even when you're absorbing this bad news, remember, look around, see how technology is making the world a better place.
Look at your phone and see the things you could do that you couldn't do before.
Go online, see the things you can learn that you couldn't learn before.
See the ways you can work that you couldn't work before.
Keep the core message in your head that technology is progress, even if the news isn't covering it that way.
Let's talk about honesty.
This is a big one that I think people... In fact, you know, we talk about a lot of people who...
maybe didn't learn this lesson that honesty is important.
And for a while they do okay with it, but inevitably they get caught.
So how do you think about learning to be honest if you're a high schooler?
The best skill is to learn to be honest to yourself.
Like if your own relationship with yourself is, you can't be honest about things.
What do you really think?
And in your core, if you're not honest with yourself, your relationship with your parents, your relationship with your friends, with institutions, it's going to be tricky.
We run across folks that seem like they've deferred a lot of this honesty.
I think that the thing you should understand about the startup world is that
A lot of it works because of honesty.
A lot of the reasons why early adopting customers will use you is because they think you're going to be honest.
A lot of reasons why investors might give you money, why your co-founders might work with you, employee might work with you.
A lot of reasons why people make things happen in the startup world is because we're in a high-trust environment.
Yeah, and this is one of those, like, negative things that people say about nerds is, oh, this person has no manners.
They just say whatever they think.
Like, again, in polite society.
It's just for the while of the time.
Something a nerd would do is be like, hey.
Why are we shipping this product that no one wants?
It's like, hey, shut up, man.
That's what a nerd would do.
You're bad for telling the truth about something because it's impolite and you're hurting people's feelings.
And so there is part of the nerd culture in this that I think is good, which is essential.
The person who would stand up and raise their hand and point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes.
Yeah, no, I totally agree.
And so I love that because it's both be honest to the stakeholders around you, but it's also that honesty to yourself, right?
Like if you know your product sucks, if you know you don't care about your user,
You gotta acknowledge that.
And then I think the last one is learn to love long games.
And this is kind of the theme they brought out in the beginning.
And I remember when I started my startup, I was 23 years old, and I had never done anything that took very long.
When you really think about it, like, what do you do in school?
What's the longest project you have in school?
Like, maybe a senior thesis in college?
And so I remember talking to our lawyer at the time and he said, oh, and he was 30, which in my mind was like impossibly old.
I was like, well, obviously nothing you know is relevant to modern times.
And he said, you know, the average startup takes seven to 10 years to exit or IPO or sell.
And I just thought that couldn't be the case.
Like, and what's funny is like, he worked at a law firm, like he worked at a law firm that represented like maybe a quarter of all tech companies.
He had the data, like this wasn't like a off the top of his head thing.
And I just remember thinking this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
And I remember when our company sold, took him out to dinner.
It was seven years later.
I was his age when he told me that.
I was 30, he was 37, impossibly old.
I just remember thinking, fuck, the guy was right.
And I think having ambition in your life involves playing the long game because to actually do something great, it doesn't happen overnight.
And I don't know what your experience is, but we know a lot of people when they were very young.
And it's okay to have ambition.
It's good to have ambition.
And true ambition means being patient over many, many, many years.
And so to give you a completely non-start-up example, my high school girlfriend, her thing was poetry.
Yeah, she really liked poetry.
Again, this is like high school.
And so she like would write all this poetry.
She read, you know, that was like her thing.
And, you know, I kind of fell out of touch with her, but she is the New York Times poetry critic now.
And that was my high school girlfriend who loved poetry.
So she played the long game.
And this is my point is that like, you know, probably not everyone that likes poetry when they're like a 16 year old is probably not going to go there.
But if you actually put in your whole life towards something and you have a dream and you're not ashamed of the dream and you keep the dream growing into your third, like a lot of people have dreams when they're young and they lose their dreams on their toys.
But if you keep your dream and put in the years of work, those are the people sitting at the top of the system.
But the people that make it are people just like you and me that had a dream and they put in 17 years, 20 years of real hard work.
Well, and then they get to reap the rewards.
And I think that it's funny because as you're describing this, like, two things went through my head.
One, I remember being in my 20s and being this, like, poor startup founder and seeing my friend in San Francisco, which isn't the most fun city, but it's another topic, and seeing my friends in New York who were in banking and finance and stuff going out and having fun.
And I remember thinking, like, why do they get to live this fun life and I have to live this hard-working life?
And then I realized, like,
This grind is going to benefit me.
And the fun that a 25-year-old has in New York, to be honest, it's pretty shitty compared to a wealthy 30-year-old.
So, to wrap up, if you're a high schooler and you're thinking about this startup game, one, that's awesome, right?
Like, we love that you're thinking about it.
Never let anyone put you down.
The game will be here when you're ready to play.
And, you know, we'll be here to help.