The Ledger, every show

“They also always tell us like, hey, like we're funding your companies. Like you shouldn't be like, you know, like telling the founders not to have high burn.”

“Well, I think that's what's so funny is because that's the, every successful YC story, that's the story in hindsight, right? It's like, everyone thought the idea sucked. It was off trend because it was off trend.”

“Literally, 40% of the last batch came in with just an idea. Most of them were working when they applied, were at work, working jobs when they applied.”

“Prices are almost exactly the same as they were during the last batch when it was like VC heaven on earth and money was flowing like crazy. We saw. 15 to 25. Some companies raised at 30. Almost no change from the last batch.”

“I think we see this in practice, too, because we will see founders who will pitch to investors, get no's, apply to YC, get into YC, and those same investors will say, now I want to invest in your company, and nothing has changed. No fundamental thing has chang…”

“What we did is that after 10 minutes of people watching free, free live video, we just put up a big thing that blocked the video that said, your ISP is not doing a free peering relationship with us, so we can no longer serve you video. If you'd like to call to…”

“When rockets are reliable, you can go anywhere in the world in 45 minutes. Like, we could commute to Tokyo.”

“You and I both saw a lot of people leave the Bay Area during COVID. All of them came back and they all said this.”

“When the Stripe Finders came to speak at YC, the other detail they added was it was the most expensive product in the market. Like, to make sure people really wanted it, they didn't give it away for free, they didn't price it comparably, they made it more expe…”

“95% of your friends doing startups are extrinsically motivated, and their startup's gonna die in the next two or three years.”

“If you look at the history of really big companies, so many of them, most investors thought that the idea was horrible.”

“All of the other products that came before it that let people do timeshare and list their places online didn't process payments. And as a result, processing payments in a low trust environment, where you have never met the host, and the host has never met you,…”

“Charging users was against the rules.”

“People who were investing in Uber were looking at markets where Uber was doing very well in unit economics and purposely funding them to expand quickly. It wasn't people looking at Uber serving no markets well, burning money left and right, and saying, oh, let…”

“The average YC company dies. Like you literally have accomplished in the scale of making any impact on the world, getting into YC means you've accomplished nothing.”

“Didn't see any change on speed. You know, we saw investors going from meeting to commitment within one to two meetings. Didn't see any difference on terms. Like, you know, investors weren't demanding board seats or weird craziness.”

“Like, a typical company in this batch got between 10, and I've seen 60 or 70 investors cold emailing them. Wanting to learn about investing in their company.”

“And it's funny how many of the financial regulations today come from people in the finance world basically doing zero sum games and like harming normal Americans and harming them so much to the point where they're like, you know what we should do? We should li…”

“Most people don't realize how the founders who they are impressed with actually take advantage of therapy, actually take advantage of medication.”

“We had raised about seven or eight million dollars. We had grown to about, I don't know, let's say like thirty million monthly people were watching content. We were making about 750,000 dollars a month in revenue, but we were, we had a million dollars a month …”

“By October, we were breakeven. By the end of December, we had generated 1.2 million dollars in profit, and we saved the company.”

“60% of the companies that do YC were rejected at some point in the past.”

“Most people, founders and investors thought these ideas were horrible, either because they were too hard to execute or because they just were bad ideas.”

“So in the extreme beginning of Uber, what was so interesting was that it launched in San Francisco, and it launched as Uber Black, which is a really expensive product, actually. It wasn't well subsidized. And the real value is that it was impossible to get a t…”

“We were always extremely transparent about our cash in hand, our months of runway, our traffic, our revenue. And there was a moment where we only had two months of runway left. We were generating about 750,000 dollars a month. We were burning about a million d…”

“We were each given 500 dollars a month walking around money, which technically is against the law because it was below minimum wage, but who cares about laws?”

“Gamers have been streaming on Justin TV since almost the beginning. At any given time, they were 20% of our traffic for years.”

“And if you look at the history of Justin TV, in the first five years, it went from being worth nothing to being worth about twenty four million dollars. In the next three years, it went being worth twenty four million dollars to being worth a billion.”

“I've been angel investing for 4.5 years. I've made 50 total investments, invested in four angel funds, 47 companies, ah, only three of them were not YC companies. 46 of them were early stage. One was, ah, late stage. It's a little company called Reddit. I hope…”

“Paul Buhite, he basically threw a piece of advice as the reason why we built a video system, which is the reason why Justin TV could exist, which is the reason why Twitch could exist.”

“And, you know, from my kind of memory of the numbers, Series A's tend to happen between 12 and 24 months post-demo day. And between 20 and 30% of companies will raise follow-on funding post demo day.”

“We went from solar being the future in the nineties to just being the commonplace reality that no one thinks too much about. And it feeling economical for a lot of people. It's like, oh, you live in a sunny area. You're gonna save some money.”

“YC has funded somewhere around 75 companies that generate over a hundred million dollars in revenue.”

“The average startup takes seven to 10 years to exit or IPO or sell.”

“60 to 80% of the time, a founder will go into office hours with one question, and we won't even end up talking about that thing. Like, that's not the actual question.”

“PG originally started YC to be a home for this type of people, right? To be a home for people who wanted to build, who didn't want to wait in line, who really didn't care about status in and of itself. They just wanted to go out there and like challenge themse…”

“Successful founders, like, explicitly block social media. They do crazy things like, you know, they grayscale their phone so it looks less interesting. They turn off notifications. They're aggressive users of, like screen time, like, tracking. Like, they actua…”

“There was one moment in my career where we were gonna get bought SocialCam was gonna get bought, and we were two months into the diligence process. And we got a call that said the deal was off.”

“Well, and what's crazy is the idea for Twitch happened after that.”

“The company only started working when Emmett and Kevin started actually talking to the users and figuring out what they wanted. Instead of, you know, the years where all of us just looked at each other, all the competitors just looked at each other, copying ea…”

“The first year we really tried to monetize, he made eight million dollars in annual revenue”

“The first version of Gmail, he basically figured out how to put his email into this Google Groups UI.”

“So what happened now in this setup is that some celebrity would start streaming, they would think they were live, no one was seeing their stream, while we were propagating their stream to all the video servers that are needed, and then suddenly the stream woul…”

“We basically, Got translation for a whole product for free.”

“Airbnb didn't realize the insight around facilitating payments, around accepting payment, when they launched. They didn't have that insight when they launched.”

“He had an impossible time raising money on Demo Day. And so if he had taken the Demo Day signal, the investor's signal of, oh, we don't want to give you money and quit, we don't have Coinbase.”

“Even though the company wasn't doing well for years, we always had a lot of traffic, you know, like the company wasn't doing well and we had like thirty million monthly visitors, like, and we were streaming like years of video to them.”

“Before people cared about their Crunchbase profile, TechCrunch just built the profiles on Crunchbase. With media reports and so on and so forth, and then after a while, people cared about their profile, and so they tried to keep it updated.”