Most mere mortals out in the world need to do step one and can't skip to step two, even though step two sounds cooler.
Yes, mere mortals, including Elon.
Including literally Elon himself was a mere mortal.
Alright, this is Dalton plus Michael and today we're going to talk about why it's so hard to copy your heroes.
Set this up for us Dalton.
Yeah, there's a common dynamic that we see in our industry where a prominent person will give advice
Like they're just giving people advice.
But it is not at all what they did to become successful.
It's the classic do as I say, not as I do, or in this case, past tense, do as I say, not as I did.
And it always gets a little bit tricky for us when we witness this.
Well, it's super weird because we're just getting old enough where for a lot of these people, we saw what they did.
Yeah, we know their story.
Yeah, we know their story.
And so we're just like, that's weird.
Yeah, that wasn't at all your path.
And so you're telling everyone to do something.
That wasn't the thing you did.
But what's weird is that if you're a 20-something, you don't know.
You only knew them as successes.
Why not take them at face value?
So what are we talking about here?
Yeah, I think there's three examples that we could think of that are folks that we, some of them we know decently well.
So Sam Altman is one, our colleague of many years.
Another one is Elon Musk.
I think people have heard of him.
And then of course Peter Thiel.
And so those are the examples that we're going to kind of talk about today.
And I think that, you know, as a note here, I'm trying to say that everything that they say is not true.
Yeah, a lot of great, really good advice.
pretty damn good people to have as heroes, considering what they've accomplished.
But if you're actually looking for the how I get to where they got.
There might be some tricks.
And so I guess to start with the example that folks have been asking us about a lot is with Sam.
And so again, for everyone's context, Sam was our colleague for like seven years.
We worked with him every day.
So we know Sam very well.
I think I first met him 15 years ago.
post seven away anyway we've known him a long time yes and he recently made some comments about hey I don't know about some of the advice I gave when I was working at YC like you know maybe there's just a better way to do startups of like going really big and being ambitious yes you know fair enough so a lot of money higher team build a lab that takes years you know
I think it's worked well for him.
And so a lot of people are asking about us.
And, you know, I think he makes fair points.
But the story is important, which we'll get to in a minute.
So maybe the next one is Elon, you know, some version of.
Oh, it's been more exciting to work in the world of Adams or YRP building.
People aren't doing ambitious enough startups.
Founders need to be fixing the world, saving the world, going to space.
Which by the way, I don't disagree with that message.
I would like founders to do that.
But that's not, once again, that might not have been his history on the news.
And the last one, of course.
His teal, he's given a lot of advice about a lot of things, which is great.
The one that we are flagging here is the whole, don't go to college, college is bullshit type of thing.
Which again, all right, there's some fair points to make there.
So let's actually go through the histories here.
So if we start with Sam, Sam's first startup wasn't OpenAI.
It was a company named Loopt.
He did it when he left Stanford.
He went to Stanford, and then he went to YC.
And then he was able to raise money for Loopt, and Loopt was like a mobile social product to see where your friends were in the city, or at least before the iPhone.
And, you know, raised a relatively small amount of money, had a relatively small team, iterated, and
Honestly, like used the YC network and then the network he built on top of the YC network to build a successful career.
Interestingly enough, like that worked really well for him.
People don't think about looped.
We don't talk about looped.
seen this video, you know, Google, this is a real thing.
But this was a really important part of how someone like this was created, how they got enough of a network to make change in the world was doing what was a pretty garden variety path similar to your nice path and many of our colleagues path, but just doing a pretty normal startup at a pretty normal age with a pretty normal
Outcome like pretty standard.
Yeah, and it's weird right like go to good school.
Do I see start a startup?
That is what led to actually open AI
And so we're just flagging this so people remember.
Is that the beginning states before OpenAI was fairly standard stuff.
And so if you actually wanted to emulate Sam, you would not immediately go try to start a lab and raise $100 million or whatever.
Because that's not at all what he did.
I guess like a really important point for like literally 99.9999% of founders, you couldn't copy Sam's play starting at open AI.
Sam couldn't copy Sam's play starting at open AI.
And by the way, and I think this is an important point to make.
Like I sometimes do meet people who can do things
better or have inherited advantages.
And the advice they give them is very different.
And so if you can do this, maybe you should consider it.
But if you can't, why are we debating whether it's the right move or not?
Yeah, a lot of the people that were most influenced by his advice of maybe I should be raising 100 million are people that are not going to raise 100 million.
So it's kind of like a disservice to these people.
And so if you're one of the people out there that can raise $100 million, they will do a startup, because if I can raise $100 million, it's not real.
All right, so the next one is Elon.
You're familiar with your story.
Yeah, so I actually heard the story from Elon verbatim.
And so I'll tell you what he told me about his life story.
And again, perhaps he is an unreliable narrator about his own life, certainly possible based on my interactions with him.
But what he told me is the reason he started
what was it called zip to and PayPal was he wanted to make a lot of money.
He said, what I wanted to do with my life is go to space.
And I knew to go to space, I needed a lot of money.
The actual line he told me, and I swear this is a direct quote is he said, my plan is to die on Mars, hopefully not on impact.
And I could tell he uses that line a lot.
I think he said this in other interviews.
But that's what he told me.
And he was like, look, when I came to the US, I came to Silicon Valley, it was the dot com boom.
And I just knew I needed money.
And so I just was like, how can I get money fast?
Again, this is very honest, the way he told us to me.
And that's why he did tech startups and like all the ideas that he came up with were just about trying to build the most successful company using I don't know the conventional stuff.
Yeah, like his ideas were pretty conventional.
It was was I need a hundred million dollars to start.
It was I mean he did raise a lot of money for for x.com But basically it was pretty standard startup stuff.
Yeah, and then he leveraged a
his success at these companies and the network that he got and the money that he made to start SpaceX, which is super cool way to go, and then became an investor in Tesla.
And many times, if you know the history of Tesla, he had to personally dip into his own checking account and bail the company out.
And if he were not an extremely wealthy person, there's no way Tesla could have existed.
And so it's very hard for us to have this knowledge and for me to have this knowledge of talking to Elon and see people trying to emulate in-state Elon.
But they're trying to live their life as per Elon's words when it's like, man, Elon didn't live his life to Elon's words.
But I'll say this, I think what's interesting is it's impressive to have this two-step plan and do it.
Like, I might even argue that what Elon did was more impressive.
Like, start two businesses, sell two businesses, be rich enough to like start self-driving car company, rock company.
Like, hell, if you've got the balls to do that.
Yeah, that's a great plan.
But again, the key thing is to realize you have to do step one.
Most, most mere mortals out in the world need to do step one and can't skip to step two, even though step two sounds cooler.
Yes, mere mortals, including Elon.
Including, literally, Elon himself was a mere mortal by this definition.
So number three is Pierre Thiel and probably one of the things that most young people know about him the most is his critique on college and like, do we need to go to college?
And I think that totally fair critique, totally valid critique, but
And not only like, did he go to college, he went to college.
He worked at a famous law firm.
And he got a law degree from Stanford.
He worked at a famous law firm and a famous bank.
And one might argue he's basically telling you to avoid all that stuff.
That stuff brought him pain.
But I think one of the things I've learned in advising startups is that if you don't let the startup experience any pain, it's a lot harder for them to learn.
And maybe experiencing that pain is what broke him into this.
Yeah, and we don't have an A-B test.
Again, people probably hate that we're saying this.
And he was exactly the person he was now by just omitting college completely.
Then fair enough, he wins the argument.
But my sense is there was some aspect of those experiences that had a profound impact on his later success.
Well, even if we separate out psychoanalyzing, you should know that he didn't walk that path.
And then use those facts as he will.
Why do people give startups advice that they didn't take?
I think you should always assume positive intent in people.
That's what I really try to do.
Especially these three people.
They're trying to help people.
And so I think this is well-meaning.
And I think what's going on is they're so used to their backstory, they almost become blind to it just like any human can forget their backstory.
And what they're really focusing on is what they would do now based on the information they have now.
Well, I want to say that more specifically.
I almost think a lot of this advice is advice that they wish they could go back in time and tell themselves.
I think Sam is one of the best fundraisers ever.
I wonder if he had tried to raise more money sooner his career to do a bigger thing.
if there was a moment where he could have gotten that done before open AI, probably.
Diddo, it was working on nuclear energy stuff for a while.
And he was at YC for a while.
He probably could have left YC earlier, right?
And by the way, I find myself doing this.
I find myself giving advice sometimes where I'm like, oh, well, I definitely went through that.
And I want to help people avoid what we did.
And so I think it's all good intent.
But I think that what's tricky is that if you're not digging for the facts, you don't know what really happened.
So how do we avoid this OIC?
Because, you know, we all did startups, we have our own scars.
Exactly, we're yourself aware and we actually try.
Someone can make a video about us about the same topic.
And so one of the things that we try to do with companies in the batch, at the beginning of the batch is we all tell our own stories about our whole backstory, what we did before we started our companies.
Everything was screwed up.
Everything was screwed up.
I think the government had the panic who were ruining their internet.
Justin says, I'm going to strap a camera in my head and broadcast my live 24-7 internet, and Paul Ramp says, I will give you $50,000 just to see what happens.
So we do whatever it is that he does, and we email MIT.
We're really honest, and I actually think it helps people get to know us, to contextualize us as humans, to know our whole story.
Yeah, I think it really helps a lot.
And to know how many mistakes you can make and still do something interesting.
And so I think it's good to actually hear, before you cherry pick bits and pieces of people's advice, it's good to kind of like a fuller perspective on their whole thing.
And even us, like I think if people knew more about us that were watching these videos, it probably would add some nuance to what we say in these videos.
I think the second thing is,
And you made this point, I think we think a lot about what would we tell people we were really close to?
What would we tell our kids?
What would we tell our friends' kids?
Like when it become, like when you can personalize it and make it real in your life, suddenly you're a little bit more maybe conservative or you're a little bit more real.
And you can be a little bit more experimental.
You know, it's like, I'm thinking about telling my kids to go to college.
And like, I didn't really like college.
And I actually wasn't terribly impressed with my school.
I wasn't terribly impressed.
But if you look at the facts, it's where I met my co-founders.
Without them, I wouldn't be here right now.
So if that's the only thing Yale did for me.
The only thing it did for me was changing my life.
What have you done for me lately though?
Imagine we had an A-B test for you to go to college.
Hey man, I don't think you'd be here.
So I'm probably going to tell them to go to college.
And again, I feel the same way.
I got kids too and I actually really try.
to give them, I try to give founders or the people in these videos, I try to say the same stuff, I would just say to my kids.
and not have a, oh, let's throw in a troll opinion here, Michael, just for the hell of it.
Well, it's funny, because PG always said this too, which is just like, it's just easier to tell the truth, like what you really think, than to think up the like, yeah, because you gotta keep all the facts straight.
But if I tell this to my kids, probably, it's good for you too.
And I think the last one, and this is one that is maybe hard for people to understand, is that
you know, when you're watching videos or reading our content, this is, we can't personalize it for you, right?
Like you're, we're making this from- Yeah, we're just talking to the void.
We don't know who's actually watching this.
But when we do office hours with companies, everything is personalized.
We read their application, we interviewed them, we accepted them to YC.
And so the advice we give is super personalized.
And it's often the case that we will know something about someone's background.
That we can integrate into- Yes.
The advice that we give them.
And I'll say that like more explicitly, we often contradict or it looks like we're contradicting kind of standard YC advice given someone's specific situation.
I'd say like on average, we're probably telling them 80% of the same stuff.
And so an example, if someone was a multi-time founder, like say Sam, and someone was known to be a good investor and we had the opinion that they were a good investor.
maybe following the playbook that he's following it open.
Yeah, it's exactly right.
And I completely think it's smart.
And let's be clear, we've had those people do YC.
And we've given them different advice.
And we have said, hey, it may make sense to raise more money.
And if you can put millions of your own money into your own company, you should totally do that.
That doesn't apply to most people.
And so I think this is what's important.
I think one of the ways that we try to kind of control ourselves is
figure out what the personal advantages are of every founder we work with and try to figure out how to help them exploit their advantages.
I think it's really, really hard to do that in general.
So shout out to, of course, Sam and Elon and Peter.
They've made a huge impact.
And, you know, are better fundraisers than us by a thousand.
They're really good at funds.
But if you want to be the next one of them, take some time to learn about them and their histories.
And I think it'd be really helpful.